Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  Within days of the passage of the Act of Congress that finally created the National Zoo, and which placed the whole enterprise under the thumb of Secretary Langley, Hornaday received a letter from Langley that he found both odd and menacing. The letter included the following “Resolution”:

  RESOLVED, That all correspondence of this institution with any person or society shall be conducted by the Secretary, and no assistant or employee shall write or receive any official letter or communication pertaining to the affairs of the institution, except under the authority and by the direction of the Secretary; and all such correspondence shall be duly registered and recorded in such manner as the Secretary shall direct.

  The whole idea for a national zoo had been Hornaday’s to begin with. He and Dr. G. Brown Goode had worked tirelessly and without ego to flesh out the endless details and sell it to Congress; then they’d fought like hellcats to procure the first two rounds of funding. As superintendent of the Zoological Park Commission, Hornaday had envisioned himself as a kind of Noah, overseeing all the breeding pairs of animals from a great ark shipwrecked in Rock Creek Park. Now with this preposterous “Resolution,” he was knocked down to the role of a mere “employee,” or even a child, someone vaguely untrustworthy who needed to be supervised and controlled lest he do something brash, foolish, or even illegal. To Langley, the resolution might have seemed a legitimate clarification of Hornaday’s subordinate role; but to the proud Hornaday, it felt like an insufferable comeuppance.

  This new resolution, with its implied suspicion and complete reordering of Hornaday’s universe, worried him in the extreme. He decided to pay a visit to the secretary. That was Hornaday’s nature. He did not know how to simply accept his fate, like a condemned man on the gallows; all he knew how to do was fight like mad to fashion his own fate. According to Hornaday’s later account, Langley received him in his vast upstairs office in the Smithsonian tower “with set mouth and hostile eye . . . the secretarial atmosphere was charged with electricity.”3

  The whole preliminary plan for the national zoo, which had been worked out in painstaking detail over the course of several years with apparent cordiality, now was completely scrapped. Hornaday had laid out plans for huge, natural enclosures, taking advantage of Rock Creek Park’s stony outcrops and ancient trees so that zoogoers could catch glimpses of the animals in something like their natural habitat. It was a revolutionary model for a zoo, and later it would be imitated around the world. But to this notion, Langley said coldly, “I have no intention of doing that,” with his mouth so tightly set he seemed to be nipping off the ends of words.

  Referring to one choice piece of the proposed grounds, Langley told Hornaday: No portion of that property will be given up to animals—all of it will be kept as the private grounds of the park administration.

  Open to visitors?

  No. It will not be open to visitors.

  Multiple entrances?

  There will be no entrance down the Adams Mill Road.

  A scenic bridge across Rock Creek?

  There will be no bridge across the river, except on the Quarry Road.4

  All these supposedly controversial details had been specified in Hornaday’s original plan—and approved by Langley.

  Slap after slap, rebuff after rebuff, Langley seemed determined not so much to create a great zoo as to make sure that he was in charge of it—down to the tiniest detail. But all the foregoing paled in comparison to Langley’s final revelation. He told Hornaday that he had appointed a committee of three men from the National Museum, who would take charge of the development of the zoological park and “control” Hornaday’s activities, because Langley “had no time” to control them himself. Hornaday knew very well that two of these men—Major John Wesley Powell and Frederick True, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian and Hornaday’s former boss—were “hostiles,” who could simply overrule the other committee member, Dr. Goode, who was a friend. The committee was effectively stacked against him. And furthermore, Langley went on—as if this were not enough—Hornaday’s job as superintendent would be only “provisional.” Once a suitable director of the National Zoo was found, the committee would be dissolved, and Hornaday would serve as the new director’s assistant.

  Assistant!

  Hornaday was being demoted from chief visionary and director of the national zoo to cage-cleaner and janitor. William Temple Hornaday was a man who had been born on a farm in the middle of nowhere, without wealth or any particular advantages in life, and he had battled his way to a position of power and prominence in the nation’s capital by means of grit, determination, and the glittering zeal of a visionary. He was a fighter down to his fingernails, but this kind of fighting—Washington fighting—was utterly confounding to him. Was the enemy Langley, or was there a person or persons behind him who had set this up? If so, why? And what was the best way to fight back? It was as if he were being stabbed in the back, but when he turned to see who was wielding the knife, they had disappeared.

  A couple of days later, after he’d regathered his composure, Hornaday went back upstairs to see Langley in his office.

  I’d like to respectfully propose, Secretary Langley, that you postpone convening this committee for six months, Hornaday said. Just give me a “trial run” conducting the affairs of the park as superintendent. The moment I make my first mistake, I’ll resign. But I have been doing this job quite successfully up to this point, and I’m confident I can demonstrate to you that I’ll be able to continue.

  No, Mr. Hornaday, I simply do not feel that you have adequate executive experience for the job, Langley said stiffly. I have talked this over with Major Powell, and he agrees with me.

  Executive experience? But I’m only asking to be allowed to continue doing what I have been doing. I think this committee is just an unnecessary and cumbersome layer of bureaucracy. Why can’t it simply be postponed until I can prove myself to your satisfaction?

  No, sir, Langley said, growing icier as he got angrier. Major Powell’s opinion is final. It was as if he was transferring the blame to John Wesley Powell, one of the two “hostiles” on the committee, even though Langley himself was the secretary of the Smithsonian and could overrule anything Powell wanted. Powell, who had lost an arm at Shiloh fighting for the Union, had later become the first man to explore the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. But that didn’t mean he knew anything about running a zoo.

  But sir, Hornaday protested, I can’t conceive how the existence of this committee would further the ultimate goal of creating a superb zoological park in Washington. It would only make my job more complicated and difficult!

  No, Mister Hornaday! Langley shouted, now thoroughly enraged, stamping his right foot on the carpet underneath his desk. I will not!

  For Hornaday, that petulant foot-stamp and Langley’s belittling rebuff were enough to decide his future course of action. When Hornaday got home from work that day, he told Josephine, his life partner and confidante, everything that had happened. He asked her if she felt he should even continue at his job at the National Museum.

  “Never!” she snapped. “What’s the use of going on if you can find no satisfaction in the work and have no real success? What would you have at the finish? Failure!”

  Hornaday told her that he really felt the only course open to him was to resign. Maybe they could move up to Buffalo and get into the real estate business with his old friend George Hedley.

  “By all means I would resign—and at once,” Josephine said, eyes flashing like an enraged tigress. “We can sell this house and move to Buffalo within a month. I’m sorry your dream of a great National Zoo has been so spoiled. But now it will never come true—never!”

  So the next day, firmly, calmly and cheerfully, Hornaday sent Langley a letter of resignation by interoffice mail. Langley’s acceptance came back by return mail, a special delivery of ice. A couple of days later, when Hornaday happened across Langley in the hall, he greeted the secretary and smiled. But La
ngley silently glared back at him.

  It was a sudden, hugely disappointing turn of events. When Hornaday’s resignation became public, it created a stir in official Washington. The newspapers tended to side with Hornaday in the fight, with one reporter for the Washington Critic describing his resignation as “a great loss to the government.”

  William Temple Hornaday was only thirty-six years old, with the best part of his life still ahead of him. He had a life companion, Josephine, who was wise and calm, sophisticated and intelligent, and who was willing to follow him anywhere. That in itself was very nearly enough. “It is good to be loved and missed and longed for by the Finest woman on earth,” he had written in one of his hundreds, perhaps thousands, of letters to her. “Never was a man more fortunate or more blessed in one woman than I am in you, and I grudge every moment that you are away from me. . . . I have grown as fond of you, and so dependent on your companionship, that when away from you I feel like a wild goose lost in the fog.”5

  Hornaday had resigned, he said to friends and in his private writings, due to the “great Langley disillusionment” and “the death of my plans for a really great Zoological Park.”6 He couldn’t help it: bitterness seeped into every word he said about it, like an ink stain. Luckily, he had an open doorway to a new and different life, so he and Josephine stepped through it. They moved to Buffalo, New York, a place where his hunting friend George Hedley was prospering in the real estate business. Hedley had tried repeatedly to lure Hornaday up to Buffalo with the promise of material gain far in excess of anything a zookeeper or taxidermist could command. But Hornaday was adamant: fighting the war for wildlife was his life’s passion and the source of its meaning. A bucket of gold did not make much difference to him.

  But now, everything had changed. Now he had no income at all, other than modest book royalties, and no other immediate propects. He gladly accepted Hedley’s offer to become secretary of the Union Land Exchange in Buffalo, and he and Josephine moved to the city in the summer of 1890. The company’s business consisted of buying large tracts of land around Buffalo, subdividing it, and selling these smaller subdivisions to other developers. Hornaday was not unqualified for his new job: he had spent more time than he cared to recall wrangling with landowners and lawyers over buying, surveying, and platting land for the zoo.

  Becoming a real estate developer was an odd transformation for a conservationist, a wrenching U-turn in many ways. But Buffalo was booming, there seemed to be an insatiable demand for new housing, and for the first couple of years, the Union Land Exchange boomed along with Buffalo. Niagara Falls was now being harnessed to provide electric power, and the town lit up with that nineteenth-century wonder, the electric lightbulb. In 1892, Hornaday had a handsome house built for himself and Josephine on Humboldt Parkway at a cost of $8,000 (about $250,000 in today’s dollars).7

  Then came 1893. A financial panic swept through the post–Civil War economy, and the gross national product fell about 4 percent in a single year, and 6 percent the next year. By 1894, unemployment soared to more than 18 percent.8 The panic deepened into one of the worst depressions in U.S. history. After years of doing a “roaring trade,” between March 1893 and July 1894, the Union Land Exchange did not make a single sale. By contrast, Hornaday’s previous life as a wildlife warrior and zookeeper, with all its turbulence and uncertainty, seemed tame.9

  To support himself and Josephine, Hornaday turned to writing articles about natural history for popular magazines. He began to dabble in local politics, but eventually he grew so disgusted with the incompetence and venality of other politicians that he began to wonder whether he might just return to Borneo to live among the Dyak head-hunters, who were so good-hearted, decent, and moral.

  But eventually, his efforts to retreat from the war for wildlife were overwhelmed by his growing alarm that the war was being lost, and fast. He began shouting from the rooftops again, ill-tempered and unsociable, pouring out his concerns in articles and letters to the editor. By 1896, he had almost entirely lost interest in his not-very-successful career as a businessman and was champing at the bit to resume the great fight for the the wild animals. The task was too urgent, the price for inaction too great.

  Then, one day in 1896, out of the blue, a letter landed in his mailbox. It was from the board of directors of the newly formed New York Zoological Society, a committee of men whose names he knew, and whom he also knew were “men of the kind who never do small things.” The letter explained that the board intended to build a New York zoological park, something befitting one of the greatest cities in the world, and the members were inquiring as to whether he might be interested in the job of director. His first reaction was: “No! Positively not! I am forever done with ‘scientists’ and zoological parks!” But in fairly short order, he realized that this was the chance of a lifetime and accepted the job with gratitude. The starshine of good fortune had fallen on William Temple Hornaday once again.

  Looking back on the series of events that led him to become the first director of what would later become the world-renowned Bronx Zoo, Hornaday reflected later in life that his resignation from the National Zoo was “one of the wisest acts of my life. . . . I have been so pleased with its results that I now look back upon Professor Langley as a cantankerous instrument chosen by the hand of Fortune to pilot me to the theatre of my real life work, while his fell into the Potomac.”10

  Hornaday can be forgiven his bitter fit of pique—but if he were to pay a visit to the National Zoo today, more than a century after his falling-out with Samuel Langley, he would probably be pleased by what he found. In contrast to Langley’s cramped, controlling vision of a kind of Alcatraz for animals, the 163-acre National Zoological Park now attempts to display its more than two thousand animals and birds in large, naturalistic enclosures that at least somewhat resemble their natural habitat—a style imitated in zoos around the world. Behind the scenes, the zoo also conducts extensive scientific research in captive breeding and conservation biology. Long after both men’s deaths, Hornaday’s vision is the one that ultimately won out.

  CHAPTER 15

  Scandal at the Zoo

  When William and Josephine Hornaday moved from Buffalo to Stamford, Connecticut, in 1896, the country was in the throes of a Gilded Age zoo-building craze. City after city announced plans to create zoological parks, most of them modeled after Hornaday’s original design for the National Zoo—Boston, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and St. Louis all laid-out gaudy dreams, often adorned with Italianate piazzas, fountains, and lavish, formal lawns and gardens, as a diadem on each city’s crown of ambition and an echo of some imagined Eden.1 A couple of months before he was offered the job in New York, Hornaday had turned down a similar offer to build a zoo in Pittsburgh.2 The great World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, in Chicago, had shown every other American city the outer limits of the possible and given them a high-water mark to match.3

  And yet New York, the biggest, brawniest, messiest city on the continent, had only the Central Park menagerie—a motley collection of outdoor cages inhabited by a few sorrowful dromedaries, bears, and monkeys, all perennially infected with fleas.4 The Central Park zoo was popular with the teeming masses—the pipefitters, carpenters, dishwashers, clerks, and waitresses who swarmed the Lower East Side in uncountable numbers, most living in squalid tenements without indoor plumbing and speaking a babel of different languages. In 1894, according to one historian, New York City had over 1.8 million residents, of whom 1.4 million had been born abroad or had at least one foreign-born parent.5 The editor of the Saturday Evening Post called New York “a great foreign city with an American quarter.”6 Rudyard Kipling put it more harshly, calling the city “a despotism of the alien, by the alien, for the alien, tempered with occasional insurrections of decent folk.”7

  At the same time, less than a mile uptown, a whole different class of people were conducting lives so foreign to the Central Park zoogoers that they might have been orbiting a differ
ent sun. A great stillness hung over their world, punctuated by polite sounds like the distant clink of serving dishes in the butler’s pantry or the whirr of carriage wheels up a long gravel drive. It was a world of Park Avenue mansions, country estates on the Hudson, gentlemen’s clubs, and sumptuous private railroad cars. And in 1895, the idea of creating a world-class zoo in New York—something entirely different from the flea-bitten sideshow in Central Park—began to take shape in the rarefied air of this upper-class world.

  Theodore Roosevelt—a man who seemed to be everywhere, doing everything, and who was very much a part of this influential world—had a hand in it. Along with two young aristocratic brothers, Madison and DeForest Grant, Roosevelt formed a committee of the Boone and Crockett Club in 1895 to look into creating a New York Zoological Society and a splendid New York zoo.8 The committee chose as its chairman Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, the celebrated paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, who was a childhood friend of Roosevelt. Among many other accomplishments, he had first described and named Tyrannosaurus rex.9

  Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, and William Temple Hornaday, the zoo’s new director, would emerge as a kind of triumvirate of energy, vision, and determination, who together began willing the New York zoo into being. And what they envisioned was breathtaking: The biggest zoo in the world, spread over something like 300 acres, which would make it four times larger (at least geographically) than the Berlin Zoo, the world’s largest. It would not be a zoo like the private reserves of European noblemen, beautiful but inaccessible to the average man, or the zoos of Europe, which were small urban affairs. It would be a sprawling showpiece for New York and the New World, filled with huge naturalistic enclosures that would suggest the immensity and majesty of America.