Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  One thing that became evident in this great battle royal was that, without international cooperation, any treaty was useless. After all, the U.S. Congress passed a law in 1898 to stop pelagic (open-sea) sealing by American sealers—but that simply left the rookeries ripe for plundering by fleets of Japanese and Russian sealers. International borders are figments of the human imagination; they mean nothing to the ancient migrations and movements of wild populations. (More modern attempts to hammer out international whaling treaties encounter the same difficulties.) It was not until 1911 that the Hay-Elliot Fur Seal Treaty was passed, between Japan, Britain, Russia, and the United States. Stopping all pelagic sealing immediately, it was the first international treaty to protect wildlife. It also put in place a complete five-year ban on any sealing anywhere on the islands. By 1930, there were believed to be a million fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. Although Hornaday is often credited with having saved the fur seal from extinction, in his own account of what happened he gives most of the credit to Elliot, a man with “unquenchable personal courage.”9

  Yet even so, these victories often came at such personal cost that they felt almost like defeats. “I have many ex-friends who never will forgive me for having started that fur-seal campaign,” Hornaday later wrote. By now he was nearing sixty, and he didn’t have the stamina for the fight that he once had.

  Furthermore, it made his soul sag to come face to face with the reckless blood-lust that was so common throughout the country. For so many, it didn’t matter that the fur seal would likely be wiped off the face of the Earth. That last bundle of sealskins, that last dollar, was all some people ever thought about. So long as there was profit to be had, so long as there was one last nickel to be made, every creature that walked or flew was in peril. And by some dark perversity of human nature, the rarer a species became, the closer it got to its absolute and utter end, the more coveted a trophy it became. It had very nearly happened to the buffalo, and now it had almost happened to the fur seal as well. Didn’t anybody ever learn? Was there no end to the greed, stupidity, and short-sightedness of man?

  It was necessary and important to fight for federal, state, and local laws to protect wildlife, but there was something else much more fundamental that seemed to be lacking in America: a sense of moral responsibility, and moral outrage, at what was happening. Wildlife did not belong to the hunters, who comprised only about 3 percent of the population, Hornaday argued in his books and articles. It didn’t belong to the people who lived in rural areas, who tended to think of local birds and game as their birthright. It “belonged”—if it belonged to anyone—to all the people of the United States, and to the world, so it was a shared national responsibity, as well as a national blessing. William Temple Hornaday may not have added any new species to the incunabula of science, but he knew how to stir people’s sense of ownership and outrage and, in this way, how to change the world.

  In 1911, late at night, after his duties as director of the New York Zoological Park and all the rest of his work were through, William Temple Hornaday would sit down to write one of the angriest and most important books about endangered species ever written. It was to be called Our Vanishing Wild Life, and it would catalog, in text and photographs, the appalling condition of birds and game across the United States. Wild things of all kinds were being driven to the brink of extinction not by poachers but by the “armies of destruction”—millions of legally licensed hunters taking to the woods in a country where the hunting laws, such as they were, had essentially been written by hunters, to maximize the killing of game. “It is time for all men to be told in the plainest terms that there never has existed, anywhere in historic times, a volume of wild life so great that civilized man could not quickly exterminate it by his methods of destruction.”10

  Even the victories of conservationists seemed tenuous in the face of such unrelenting firepower. It was true that, by the second decade of the twentieth century, the profusion of feathered hats that had crowded the streetcars and boulevards of New York back in 1886 had now almost disappeared. But that didn’t mean the feather trade was beaten—far from it, in fact. From his office in the Bronx, all Hornaday had to do was hop a streetcar over to the Manhattan clothing store of E. & S. Meyers, at 688 Broadway, and take a look in the shop window. There on display, like the raiments of angels, were 600 plumes and skins of birds-of-paradise, to be sold for millinery purposes. Birds-of-paradise were, in truth, almost too beautiful for this world. One species had a glimmering green gorget at the throat; others had spectacular explosions of yellow or crimson plumes, with iridescent green and black markings down the neck. Feathers of these birds were so coveted that, between 1904 and 1908, 155,000 carcasses were sold at auction in the London feather markets, according to one contemporary accounting.11

  But wasn’t all that illegal now? Didn’t the new game laws prohibit the importation of the skins and plumage of any wild bird, for any commercial purpose whatsoever? Well, not exactly. The feather dealers had discovered a loophole. The Dutcher Law protected from the feather trade only birds belonging to avian families native to the United States. But all forty-three species of the bird-of-paradise were native to New Guinea or its surrounding islands. The feather trade had found a hole in the law big enough to drive a delivery truck through, and so they did.12

  And despite the new fashion sensibilities of women in New York, Hornaday still saw carnage whenever he looked abroad. London, he wrote, was still “the head of the giant octopus” of the plume merchants, reaching its malignant tentacles out to the world’s most remote places. Paris was still the manufacturing center of feather trimming and ornaments, employing thousands of people (mostly underpaid women). If the recently broadened mandate of the New York Zoological Society was the protection of “all the wild animals of the world,” the theater of war included Paris and London, as well as Berlin and Amsterdam, where brisk business in feathered hats had barely slackened.

  As part of his research for his book, and on behalf of the New York Zoological Society, Hornaday dispatched a young ornithologist named C. William Beebe to the London feather markets in August 1912.13 It wasn’t even necessary for Beebe to go “undercover” in the way of modern reporters; he simply studied the records of activity of the feather dealers as an ordinary businessman would. In three separate sales representing the activity of six months during the previous year, as Beebe reported, four London feather dealers sold skins and plumage representing a total of 223,490 birds. In the London Feather Sale of May 1911, for instance, the firm of Figgis & Co. reported that it had sold the skins and plumage of 362 birds-of-paradise, 384 eagles, 206 trogons, and 24,800 hummingbirds. Beebe’s report included only the transactions of four firms, for half the year, so the annual total was approaching half a million birds. And that took no account of all the other London dealers, or those in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, or anywhere else.

  William Temple Hornaday was a man whose army was always on the march, and who engaged the enemy wherever and whenever his forces seemed most likely to prevail. In January 1913, when Our Vanishing Wild Life was so recently published it still smelled like fresh ink, a propitious moment occurred. This time, the battle would occur in the halls of Congress. Now he had a chance to help craft far-reaching legislation that would plug the loophole in the Dutcher Law and protect any wild bird, from anywhere, from being slaughtered and imported into the United States.14

  On January 30, when the East was still sheathed in ice and snow, Hornaday took the train down to Washington to appear before the Ways and Means Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives. For the previous month, the 69th Congress had been conducting hearings on a new tariff bill, which would rewrite the laws about products imported into, or exported out of, the United States. The House had requested Hornaday’s testimony about the feather trade, and he was prepared to give them an earful.

  As a kind of disquieting visual aid, Hornaday brought along with him a suitcase filled with the plumage and the skins of various
exotic birds, purchased from the feather dealers. Two weeks earlier, he also had distributed to every member of Congress a freshly printed copy of Our Vanishing Wild Life, hoping to soften up the opposition. Even if senators refused to read the book, simply scanning the photographs—a picture of 1,600 hummingbird skins at a London auction house, on sale for two cents each; or a crumpled snowy egret, shot on her own nest as most of them were, wings splayed like a fallen angel—might have been enough to give them pause.

  When Hornaday got up to speak on behalf of the New York Zoological Society on January 30, 1913, wearing his best suit and a starched shirt, he told the committee that he believed, if the current practices of the feather trade continued, at least one hundred of the most beautiful and interesting species of birds in the world would soon be exterminated. He told the gathered members of Congress that the new tariff act should prohibit the importation into the United States of all the wild birds of the world, not just those from families native to the United States. If Congress could succeed in doing that, the feather dealers’ rape of the world’s exotic birds might be stopped, or at least signficiantly slowed.

  Hornaday’s comments, pugnacious and vehement, were followed by those of T. Gilbert Pearson, secretary of the National Audubon Societies, a small, tidy man who gave a measured and careful presentation about declining bird populations to balance Hornaday’s super-sized personality. Pearson was followed by ornithologist and lecturer Henry Oldys, whose comments were so fiercely accusatory they could have been uttered by Hornaday himself. The spirit of the age was rife with ignorance, greed, and stupidity, Oldys said, all of which combined

  to exterminate the whale, the seal, the manatee, the alligator, the American antelope, the moose, the caribou. . . . History will not listen to the plea, “It was not my business.” I[t] will answer: “You were there and you could have prevented it; therefore, it was your business. You failed to do your duty. The only explanation is that you were corrupt, ignorant or weak.15

  A few weeks after Hornaday’s testimony, Representative Francis Burton Harrison contacted him to ask if he would draft a clause for the tariff bill that would embody his ideas about the protection of wild birds. Two days later, Hornaday sent Harrison his suggested wording:

  Provided, that the importation of aigrettes, egret plumes, or “osprey” plumes, and the feathers, quills, heads, wings, tails, skins or parts of skins, of wild birds, either raw or manufactured, and not for scientific or educational purposes, is hereby prohibited; but this provision shall not apply to the feathers or plumes of ostriches, or to the feathers of domestic fowls of any kind.16

  It seemed an almost airtight ban that would protect all wild birds, from anywhere, from being imported into the United States for any commercial purpose whatsoever. The clause was accepted and incorporated into the new bill, with no changes at all, and the bill passed the House on April 7, 1913.

  And that’s when the trouble began.

  The feather millinery trade had been “caught napping” during the hearings in the House, and its lobbyists and lawyers frankly admitted it. One feather-trade lobbyist named Leo Simon told Hornaday, “You never would have got that clause through the House if I had known what was going on.”17 But now they were awake, and they were going to make sure that Hornaday and his allies did not succeed in final passage of this bill.

  One of Hornaday’s primary roles in the wildlife wars had always been to serve as a kind of populist rabble-rouser, a tub-thumping provacateur. That was one core purpose of his latest, angriest book. It was as much lobbed firebomb as journalistic reportage. Now he harnessed his ability to incite a riot and his own terrible rage and fear and sent out an emotional, nationwide appeal to the conscience and morality of the women of America. He and his minions sent out the word to thousands of “militant women” around the country, often those who served as presidents or chairwomen of local conservation groups, to contact their state delegations in Congress and prevail on them to fight on behalf of the birds. And the women took up the call.

  The feather lobbyists responded to this with a trickier, more weasel-like approach. They didn’t turn to the public at all (likely because they knew they would lose in the court of public opinion—125 newspapers in thirty-three states had come out in favor of the ban on feather imports, and only one spoke up in support of the feather trade). Instead, the lobbyists presented written briefs to an obscure, special subcommittee of the Senate Finance Committee, which had only three members but which also had the power to affect the outcome of the debate. The lobbyists had only three hearts they needed to change, not millions. It became clear that they might prevail after all, in spite of everything.

  In a desperate, last-ditch effort, Hornaday enlisted the outrage of the general public, as he had so many times before. He drafted an indignant, three-page pamphlet that he titled, as if he were yelling the whole thing, “The Steam Roller Of The Feather Importers In The United States Senate; The Lobby Of The Feather Trade Jubilant—Thus Far; A Warning To The American People”: “The two dozen or so supporting millinery houses of New York who make a specialty of wild birds’ plumage and skins, are driving a steam roller through the United States Senate, flattening out all opposition to the ‘feather trade,’” Hornaday began his bitter screed. “Though the hands that guide their steam roller are visible, the power that propels it is unseen and mysterious.”18

  Up until now, both houses of Congress had “patriotically responded to every reasonable appeal made to them in behalf of vanishing wildlife,” he wrote. And when the House had been presented with Hornaday’s proposed clause to protect wild birds in the new tariff bill, they had acted honorably—when uninfluenced by the lobbyists for the feather dealers. But when it came before the Senate, the merchants’ shrewd, subterranean lobbyists had managed to sway the crucial subcommittee and circumvent the will of the people.

  The choice before the American people now was stark, Hornaday bellowed in his pamphlet, in boldfaced italics: “Shall the two or three dozen New York importers of wild birds’ plumage be permitted to defeat the will of two or three dozen millions of American people who abhor the traffic and desire its discontinuance?”

  He sent the pamphlet out to twenty-four leaders of the conservation movement of the day, including Gilbert Pearson; Henry Oldys; Joseph Grinnell, of the California Academy of Sciences; Warren Miller, editor of Field and Stream; ornithologist William Brewster; and prominent women conservationists Louise Blocki, May Riley Smith, Sadie American, and Katherine Stuart. They all signed it, without making a single change. Hornaday also appended a list of the dozens of senators, both Republican and Democratic, who supported the feather ban.

  When the pamphlet was printed, signed, and sent out to all the members of the U.S. Senate, Hornaday later recalled, “I quaked with fear that I would be hauled before the bar of the Senate for high treason, or at least contempt; but nothing of that kind happened.” One of the subcommittee’s members, Hoke Smith of Georgia, did have something to say about Hornaday and his little pamphlet, however: “I want to say for myself that, if he is no more truthful in his other publications than he was in that, the article was so utterly false, I would not care to read anything he wrote.” Senator George McLean, from Connecticut, tried to soothe Smith a bit by saying that “they are zealous men, these ornithologists.”19

  When the plumage clause of the tariff bill came up for discussion in the Democratic caucus, the Washington Post later reported, it caused a heated argument that raged for five hours. When the caucus at last voted—deciding to throw out Hornaday’s clause completely and accept the wording of the feather trade—Senators George E. Chamberlain and Harry Lane, both of Oregon, stood up to protest. They bitterly denounced the decision to essentially withdraw all protections for birds, and they announced their intention to withdraw from the caucus if the decision held. Hornaday was told later that, because “no party likes to provoke any of its important members into bolting,” the decision of the caucus was then reversed, and the m
easure passed with Hornaday’s original wording intact.

  The birds had won the day.

  Because of their “fearless and determined leadership in saving the feather millinery cause from annihilation,” Hornaday later wrote in Thirty Years War for Wild Life, America owed a debt of gratitude to Senators Chamberlain and Lane, the good gentlemen from Oregon, who had staked their reputations on protecting the birds. A month later, President Woodrow Wilson signed into law paragraph 347 of the Wilson Tariff Act, broadly prohibiting the importation of plumes and skins of wild birds for any commercial purpose whatsoever.20 For his efforts in this fight, Hornaday was awarded a silver medal from the French conservation group the Societe d’Acclimatation, and a gold one from Britain’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.21

  A snowy egret on her nest in the Everglades, a courting bird-of-paradise on the Aru Islands, a lyrebird cooing in the Australian outback—all could rest better now (though they did not know it) because strong new legal protections had taken effect that would help keep their human enemies at bay.

  CHAPTER 19

  Two Hundred Years of War

  In 1926, at the age of seventy-two, William Temple Hornaday retired as director of the New York Zoological Park, after three decades of service. An adoring notice of his retirement, published in Time magazine, referred to him as “the presiding genius and animal-man of the Bronx.” The New York Times observed that “if the vanishing wild life that he had labored to save could know that their great good friend was leaving a post that had given him so much authority as their foremost champion, there would be mourning in the ranges, in the high woods, and among the Sierras.”1

  But among all the many notable battles Hornaday had won, there was one he’d lost. Around the turn of the century, he’d sent letters to sixteen New York daily newspapers demanding that his place of employment be referred to as “The New York Zoological Park,” and not—God forbid—“the Bronx Zoo.” The latter, he sniffed, was “undignified, offensive . . . injurious . . . unnecessary, and therefore inexcusable.” The only people in the city who needed to be told that the zoo was in the Bronx were “newly arrived immigrants, and the harmless imbeciles in our asylums for the insane.”2