Locust

by Jeffrey A. Lockwood

  University records clearly show that Aughey had a heavy workload of teaching biology, botany, zoology, chemistry, geology, and German. What is less evident is whether Aughey actually taught in proportion to this demanding schedule. Students complained that he missed classes, and this reported absenteeism coincides with other claims that he was in his laboratory from early morning to late night. Evidently, doing science was far more interesting to Aughey than teaching about it. He performed chemical analyses on a remarkably varied but seemingly haphazard assortment of substances, including soil, sugar beets, and patent medicines. The professor even performed autopsies, apparently undeterred by a lack of formal medical training.

  Aughey was eventually named the first curator of the Nebraska State Museum, a position from which he was able to recapture the spotlight. In this capacity he could effectively advance the cause of avian conservation as vital to suppressing outbreaks of the Rocky Mountain locust. Much of what scientists and legislators came to believe about the role of birds as keystone predators of locusts was the result of Aughey’s work and writing. His passion for this subject led him to make—or at least to report—observations on the locust-eating habits of 250 species of birds, including the dissection of stomach contents from more than 600 individuals. Aughey reported that virtually all of these birds ate locusts, including various finches and grosbeaks, which are normally considered seed-eating. Such records are far-fetched but conceivable. However, the integrity of Aughey’s science was clearly compromised by his report of finding four locusts in the stomach of a ruby-throated hummingbird, a creature that is anatomically and behaviorally incapable of such feeding.

  Nevertheless, Aughey’s authoritative presentation of observations and fastidious tabulation of data persuaded state and federal officials of the veracity of his work. He organized his report using a faulty taxonomic framework, rich in supercilious terms but lacking in scientific rigor. The credibility of his fifty-page discourse that was sent to and printed by the U.S. Department of the Interior might well have been called into question when the nomenclature of the birds had to be revised by an expert in Washington, D.C. But the federal commissioners presumably believed that Aughey’s muddled taxonomy did not negate his ecology. If doing the right thing for the wrong reason is cause for admiration, then Aughey can be heartily commended for instigating legal protection for birds across the West. Birds surely were of some benefit during locust outbreaks, but their actual efficacy was a mere fraction of what Aughey’s imaginative qualitative and quantitative estimates suggested.

  One might forgive Aughey’s passion for birds as the well-meaning efforts of a devoted conservationist. But, alas, his creativity in the realm of science was not limited to the ecology of birds and locusts. As befits academic understatement, a later museum director described Aughey’s record keeping as being “of little use.” Aughey’s botanical catalog for Nebraska apparently bordered on scientific fraud, being based on work from other authors rather than actual specimens from his museum. The university’s historian diplomatically described him as “a loveable personality [but] the enormous burden laid upon his shoulders by the University did not tend to foster scientific precision.” Aughey was unquestionably devoted to service and had a strong public following even though his replies to various queries were “based upon a minimal amount of scientific investigation.” The public wanted timely and authoritative answers—accuracy was less important.

  Although Aughey’s science was shaky—if not fictionalized or even falsified—his politics were robust. He was an ardent booster for the state, claiming that Nebraska soil could miraculously regenerate its own fertility and that “rain follows the plow.” And in the end, Aughey’s downfall was not scientific malfeasance but administrative misjudgment. The Board of Regents was not pleased with the time Aughey was spending in Wyoming investigating coal deposits, in which officials suspected he had a financial stake. The tensions came to a head in 1883 when Aughey became embroiled in a scandal involving forged endorsements. With four court judgments against him, Aughey resigned while continuing to maintain that he was “innocent as an angel” and that he was being persecuted for his support of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

  The minister-turned-scientist became territorial geologist for Wyoming, but four years later tragedy struck again. On a visit to a smelter in Kentucky, Aughey was poisoned by chemical fumes. After five years of convalescence in Hot Springs, Arkansas, Aughey returned to the ministry. The scientist-turned-minister became a pastor in Abner, Alabama, but his multifarious passions were undiminished. This time, his biological urges became his downfall. Aughey had continued to keep in touch with friends in Nebraska, including a married woman. Alas, he was as careless with his love letters as he’d been with his scientific data. Mrs. Aughey discovered his romantic indiscretion and mailed one of her husband’s more steamy notes to the Lincoln Weekly News.

  The editor apparently didn’t find the disgraceful conduct of the city’s former resident worthy of the front page. But it did rate a big headline on page 3: “Loved Each Other: And Both Are Married but Not to Each Other.” The accompanying story began:There is a neat bit of gossip current down around the village of Waverly in which two well-known people are involved in a decidedly embarrassing way. . . . Evidence is not wanting to show that, although the former has a husband who enjoys the respect of the community, and the latter an extremely estimable wife, these two parties have been carrying on a clandestine correspondence and telling to each other a great many things that should never be told outside of a family circle.

  The paper followed with what were apparently juicy snippets from the intercepted letter, although modern prurient interests would find little titillating in the excerpts.

  Apparently shamed by these public revelations, Aughey returned to academics, teaching at a small college in Alabama. Although he died in 1912, scandal lived on. When his daughter offered to endow a scholarship at the University of Nebraska in her father’s name seven years after his death, the chancellor politely declined. He suggested, “I am inclined to think that under the circumstances perhaps you would prefer to have the memorial in some other institution where there is no forgotten record that might possibly be brought to light.”

  The settlers had learned that Christian faith and Yankee ingenuity were not surefire solutions to the locust invasions. And now, if the beleaguered farmers could not count on Aves or academicians, where could they turn for help? There remained one last hope. Even in the nineteenth century, there was one creature that was seemingly more plentiful than birds and surely more powerful than professors: the politician.

  The federal government had lured the homesteaders to the West, and the state and territorial governments stood to benefit handsomely from land taxes and commerce if the settlers stayed. Even the railroads, and by association the eastern industrialists, profited from a vibrant agricultural economy on the frontier—every trainload of wheat heading east and every freight car of manufactured goods heading west meant revenue. So, with everyone benefiting from the success of the farmers, how could the government possibly fail in its obligation to them? How, indeed.

  5

  Politicians and Pests

  THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN LOCUST PRESENTED THE NATION with a set of problems that forced a radical reconsideration of our assumptions regarding natural disasters, agrarian values, and needy people. Perhaps most dramatically, the locusts catalyzed the great social transformation in which the virtue of hard, honest work was supplanted by a new standard of worth. With the decline of agrarianism and the commensurate rise of industrialism, the country began to equate success with money. As wealth became the measure of virtue, poverty became not simply a material failing but evidence of moral turpitude. In short, people who lacked money lacked social worth.

  Contrary to the Jeffersonian ideal of self-sufficiency and independence, the needy pioneers were weak in spirit. According to this view, what the impoverished locust victims needed was a strengthening of moral c
haracter—with just enough assistance to keep them from starving. These spiritually and materially poor folks would have to learn the harsh lessons of their failed lives. And providing them with excessive handouts would only enable them to become permanently dependent on the virtuous and wealthy.

  Today we still struggle with the ethical response to poverty as we debate how to allocate resources to alleviate human suffering. We continue to argue whether the poor are lazy or unfortunate, whether public assistance is a handout or a hand up, and whether welfare deepens the rut of dependence or provides a road to autonomy. Compassionate conservatism is a nineteenth-century notion dressed up in twenty-first-century jargon. But, we might object, at least modern society doesn’t blame the victims of natural disasters for their condition. We might question how many times we should pay to rebuild beach houses along hurricane alley, farmhouses in flood plains, or log cabins in fire-climax forests, but we would never suggest that people bring tornadoes or earthquakes on themselves by leading immoral lives—right? Except, in the eyes of at least some segments of contemporary society, the natural disaster of AIDS is viewed as the punishment of sinners by an angry God.

  And so it was that the Rocky Mountain locust forced the nation into its earliest confrontation with three of the great issues in American culture. First, this insect brought into sharp relief the conflicting ideals of agrarianism and industrialism, of work and wealth. The existence of the working poor and the lazy rich had to be understood. Next, these creatures compelled us to confront the nature of poverty. As the cities were struggling with the economic depression of the 1870s, the countryside was fighting hunger. Finally, the locusts forced every level of government to come to terms with its obligations to the people in times of suffering and need. The conservatives, liberals, and libertarians had very different notions about the propriety of public assistance. These fundamental questions continue to lie at the center of our society in the twenty-first century: Should we value work and effort or wealth and success? Are poor people indolent beggars or unfortunate victims? And what are the ethical duties of society, community, and family during times of adversity? Perhaps the story of the Rocky Mountain locust holds more lessons for our modern culture than we might initially attribute to the tale of a lowly insect.

  CHARITY BEGINS AT HOME

  The country found its private and public services woefully unprepared for the locust’s ravages. According to the American historian Gilbert C. Fite, “Want and privation were more widespread on the upper Midwest and central prairie frontier in 1874 and 1875 than at any other time during the settlement of that region.” However, most social services were based in the cities, where poverty and joblessness had become a serious problem. In urban settings, poverty was generally an acute condition, with only a small portion of families needing help at any time. But the locusts were generating prolonged destitution across entire regions. By all accounts, the rural settings should have been free of such troubles. After all, the people had the raw materials for self-sufficiency. With soil, seed, and labor, the settlers ought to have had everything they needed. Dry years, wet years, hail, frost, and insects were part of farming on the frontier. What destitute homesteaders needed was a stronger moral fiber, not a handout.

  In light of sociological conditions, it is not surprising that private charities were the first organizations to provide assistance to families left destitute by the Rocky Mountain locust. The nation was facing hard times, and ironically the scale of the locust infestations was so great that the only conceivable response was homegrown intervention. Local, grassroots aid societies were not logistically or financially well prepared for the disasters, but they were more nimble and empathetic than government agencies. Even so, judgmentalism often trumped compassion.

  Parochialism and paternalism undermined an otherwise altruistic effort. Perhaps F. W. Giles spoke for many of his neighbors in complaining, “Even in these frontier counties, the lack of supplies exists chiefly among the immigrants who have come in the State within the last year or so, and who had no dependence for living but the sod crops which the grasshoppers destroyed. Strictly speaking, a large number of the destitute are hardly citizens of Kansas at all.” An editorial in the St. Paul Pioneer Press expressed anti-immigrant sentiments in even more explicit terms, claiming that providing aid was tantamount to teaching the settlers, “especially those from foreign countries,” to be permanent mendicants. Hearing widespread rumors of destitution, a righteous Kansan paternalistically warned, “It was apparent that an indiscriminate and desultory system of begging would be resorted to, and as a consequence an irreparable injury to the moral sentiment of our people, as well as disgrace to the State, would ensue.”

  Soon, the aid organizations themselves came under fire. People levied strident accusations of favoritism, wastage, stealing, and corruption among the private charities. These unsubstantiated charges led to calls for county-level control over the funds. Integrity aside, charities were completely overwhelmed in locust-afflicted areas, and local governments were soon dragged into the crisis.

  The western counties were a vital source of pride, identity, and community as evidenced by an 1875 newspaper editorial that proclaimed, “The counties of the Territory of Dakota are neither bankrupt nor helpless and the publication of such a bill [for state assistance] to the world is a libel and we enter our solemn protest against it. Does anyone pretend that Clay County is unable to care for its poor? Such an idea is simply ludicrous.” But throughout the West, counties lacked the finances to meaningfully assist their desperate citizens. Although the states encouraged county commissioners to redirect funds from their treasuries, few had the wherewithal to provide direct aid. The locust-ravaged case of Martin County, Minnesota, serves as an apt example. Officials estimated that 450 families needed help, or about 60 percent of the population. These people required $90,000 for bare-bones subsistence, but the total county revenue in 1874 was $2,488.

  State legislatures were fighting a losing battle in trying to keep the counties on the front line. Unfunded legislative mandates for the counties to provide hopperdozers and to coordinate the burning of infested prairies fell on deaf ears and empty palms. Some states granted local governments the ability to levy taxes to offset the costs of digging ditches to trap the locusts, but this power was of little help when the damage done by the swarms had left the residents too impoverished to pay their taxes in the first place—you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip. As the situation continued to deteriorate for the desperate settlers, state officials had no choice but to respond.

  The states had no way of objectively assessing the extent of human misery caused by the locusts, but the governors and legislators had hard, cold data unambiguously showing that a serious political problem was developing. The number of land claims in Dakota, Kansas, Minnesota, and Nebraska had fallen by more than 50 percent during the locust invasions of the 1870s. Retaining settlers and attracting immigrants were vital to economic growth, but pumping resources into the homesteaders was equivalent to admitting that a major disaster was unfolding—and the national press adored disasters. If a legislature provided aid to retain the populace, the state would be portrayed as a locust-blighted wasteland, and potential immigrants would go elsewhere. Speculators and land boomers pressured the government to keep a low profile, fearing adverse publicity nearly as much as the farmers feared the locusts. But if the states did nothing they’d continue to hemorrhage their economic lifeblood, creating the short-term impression of fine health while succumbing to demographic anemia.

  State governments also had to deal with the dueling interpretations of poverty’s causes: moral weakness and blameless misfortune. In a classic fence-sitting performance, Minnesota’s Governor Cushman K. Davis maintained that humanitarian concern compelled the state to assist the farmers who were beset by circumstances beyond their control. But he balanced this dangerously liberal position with suspicions that the poor were lacking in moral character and might be tempted to exploit p
ublic benevolence. To ensure the neediness of recipients, his state-funded assistance programs were intensively overseen by investigatory committees in rather absurd disproportion to the meager funds that were distributed.

  Minnesota’s next governor was the consummate paternalistic politician. In John Pillsbury’s view, the role of the state was to protect the poor from their own weak natures and to bring them to account for their failings. He created a wicked Catch-22 for the locust victims: If they were truly upright and deserving, then they would never deign to grovel for, let alone accept, public assistance. And so, those who asked for aid were surely lacking in moral character and demonstrably unworthy of charity. However, it is not fair to portray Pillsbury or the other western governors as utterly lacking in compassion. Indeed, the extent of the efforts by the states to assist their people suggests that the “tough love” rhetoric was a cover for what turned out to be rather soft hearts.

  The states provided assistance in various forms to locust-ravaged farms and communities, with direct aid in the form of monetary payments and loans being perhaps the least politically palatable approach. In Kansas, Governor Thomas A. Osborn told the lawmakers that 32,000 people—5 percent of the state’s population in 1875—needed help. The legislature initially considered selling bonds to fund relief efforts, but the bill failed because of a conflict over whether the moneys should be gifts or loans. After lengthy debate, the legislature authorized $73,000 in state relief bonds and authorized nineteen counties to issue bonds in specified amounts up to $5,000.