Mr. Hornaday's War

by Stefan Bechtel

  The papers, refusing to cooperate, gently chided the director. At a time when doggerel poetry was considered a form of journalism, one printed a ditty that began:

  My name is William Hornaday–

  A trifle pedagogical.

  DIRECTOR I! With ALL to say!

  My park is zoological.3

  Despite his best efforts, “the Bronx Zoo” stuck. But whatever it was called, in his thirty years at its helm, Hornaday had transformed the zoo from 200 acres of woods and an idea into something truly splendid. The society’s executive committee, in a letter accepting his resignation, praised Hornaday for having created “the most beautiful, the most popular, and the most widely known zoological park in the world.”4

  On his last day, Hornaday snapped closed his big rolltop desk in the zoo director’s office, took the subway to 125th Street and then the train to the Anchorage, his home in Stamford, Connecticut, where the long-suffering Josephine awaited him, as always. On the occasion of their fortieth wedding anniversary, Hornaday had penned six stanzas of adoration to her, called “A Gratitude Monument,” accompanied by a pencil sketch of an enormous marble tower, akin to the Washington Monument, that he wished he could build her in tribute to their years together. The last stanza read:

  Each day I humbly thank the gods

  For Thee, my Peerless Wife

  Who forty years, through hopes and fears,

  Has blessed my daily life.5

  But his return to the arms of Josephine was hardly the final curtain call of his life. In fact, on the May afternoon he retired, he was in the vortex of so many campaigns in the war for wildlife he hardly knew which way to turn. While other septuagenarians were settling into a sweet, harmless decrepitude, Hornaday was shouting from the rootops, screaming bloody murder.

  There had been great strategic victories over the years, but he never believed that he had succeeded in “winning” the fight for wildlife, or anything like it. “Anyone who thinks that the wild life of America, Europe, Africa, or India has been ‘saved’ is deceived,” he wrote. “Today it is not necessary for anyone to write a book to prove its peril. The only real issue is, What shall be done about it, if anything?”6

  Years earlier, Hornaday had realized that the task of raising funds for each of these individual wildlife campaigns was too inefficient, and too exhausting, to continue. What was needed was some permanent endowment to sustain the long-term war itself, not just each individual engagement. Having a permanent endowment would have several other tactical advantages as well. In the heat of battle, his enemies often had secretly tried to exert pressure on the Zoological Society to get him fired—in the bitter fur-seal fight, there even had been a massive “Stop Hornaday” campaign—but if his activities were privately endowed, he’d be safe from that kind of “backdoor molestation,” as he called it.7

  In 1911, Hornaday laid out a plan to create what he called the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund, an endowment of at least $100,000 raised by appeals to the conservation-minded public. The organization would be stripped down for war, with three trustees but no president, no vice presidents, and no committees of any kind. Essentially, it would be William Temple Hornaday, fueled by donations, with “absolute freedom of action.” But the fund would not merely be a vehicle for his own personal vendettas; Hornaday conceived of it as an entity that would continue the fight long after his death—in fact, for at least the next 200 years—with a succession of other brave crusaders taking the helm. On into the misty future, it was hard to say which species would be desperately imperiled, which embattled local army might need reinforcements or flanking fire, but it was certain that the side of the angels would need money, and someone like William Temple Hornaday, to lead the troops into the breach. (Although the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund did not live much longer than Hornaday, other organizations that he helped found, such as the Wildlife Conservation Society—a successor organization to the New York Zoological Society—live on to this day.)8

  “I would just like to know how many of my enemies have gnashed their teeth in impotent rage when they found it utterly impossible to find on this earth any man who could-and-would put a ball and chain upon me,” he chortled gleefully, after the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund had been established and had repeatedly outfoxed his foes.9

  His enemies must have despaired, too, because Hornaday’s energy, even into his eighties, was incredible. “Today, at 80, I am ‘elderly’ but not ‘old,’” he told the New York Times Magazine in 1935. “My faculties are in first-class working condition, my face is unlined, my relish for food would shame a wolf. I sleep like a boy. As ‘old age’ goes, I will not be through even at 90.”10 During and after World War I, when he began ranting as loudly and persistently against the “Huns,” the Bolsheviks, and the Socialists as he had against the enemies of wildlife, one observer noted, “Dr. Hornaday may not have won the war single-handedly, but he tried.”11

  He never stopped working, talking, lecturing, writing, or sending blistering letters-to-the-editor in local districts where he had read or heard of some environmental outrage. He never seemed to have fewer than five or six balls in the air at once. His vehemence and his vividness made it impossible to be neutral about him. Even his friends sometimes found him too much to take. George Bird Grinnell of the Audubon Society once wrote that Hornaday was “often irritating,” and that he really only represented “himself and a proportion of sentimentalists of the country, most of whom are women and children.” But the Columbus Dispatch, among his many other defenders, editorialized that Hornaday was “as agreeable a gentleman as one ever met, and so imbued with the importance of his work that he has become a sort of patron saint to nature-lovers all over the United States.”12

  Between 1913 and 1930, Hornaday and the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund fought an astonishing series of battles in defense of wild things and wild places. He fought successfully for the passage of the Weeks-McLean Migratory Bird Law of 1913, which paved the way for a broad new federal law to protect migratory birds, the U.S. Bird Treaty Act of 1918. He fought, this time unsuccessfully, to create no-kill game sancturies within national forests, undertaking a brutal fourteen-city lecture tour to promote the idea, but at the end of the day, he was forced to taste bitter defeat. He fought for long closed seasons on mountain sheep in the Western states, as well as protection for the pronghorned antelope. He succeeded in imposing a five-year ban on hunting of the endangered prairie chicken and remnant quail in Iowa. In 1918, he helped kill the Sulzer Alaskan Game Bill, which would have opened the door to the year-round sale of moose, caribou, mountain sheep, and deer meat, allegedly “to help win the war,” but really to declare a permanent open season on Alaskan big game. Later, Hornaday waded into the fight to rewrite the whole code of game laws in Alaska, arousing intense hostility in the state but ultimately succeeding. With the crusading editor of the People’s Home Journal magazine, Hornaday spearheaded a six-year campaign to create bird sanctuaries around the country, ultimately creating 9,066 protected reserves encompassing a total of 2.7 million acres. He fought and killed a plan to make an enormous swath of Louisiana Gulf Coast into a private shooting club for 4,000 duck hunters. Hornaday even took on fights to save endangered game and birds in South Africa and France.13

  Long after his retirement from his official duties at the zoo, Hornaday kept up a merciless long-distance bombardment from his bunker at No. 1 Bank Street, in Stamford, Connecticut, a small rented office not far from his home. From there, he published a militant broadsheet, The Plain Truth About Game Conservation, with the belligerent subtitle For The Information of Congress, The Press and the People. Take It Or Leave It!

  But Hornaday’s two bitterest and most central campaigns, of which The Plain Truth and any number of smaller skirmishes were only a part, were the fights to reduce bag limits and to reduce the absurd lethality of automatic and pump shotguns. He believed there was no possible way that the birds and game of the United States could survive for long
when—just to take one example—in 1930, there were twenty-eight states in which hunters were restricted to a daily limit of twenty-seven ducks, geese, and brant. Twenty-seven a day! And the new automatic shotguns—what Hornaday called “machine guns” or “slaughter guns”—were able to fire six blasts of buckshot in six seconds, without the hunter ever having to lift the weapon from his shoulder. What living thing could survive this fusillade for very long?14

  Hornaday, of course, was well acquainted with the thrill of the hunt, and he loved the feel, the look, the engineering, the power, and even the smell of guns. He took pains to point out that there were plenty of conscientious sportsmen out there who brought a sense of ethics and decency to hunting. Some hunting clubs, such as the Boone and Crockett Club and later Ducks Unlimited, were leading conservationists; many of the higher-class hunt clubs had already foresworn the use of automatic weapons. Although he argued that longer closed seasons and lower bag limits would ultimately increase the amount of game available to hunters, there was no way around the awkward truth: he was trying to separate men from their guns. And in America, nothing struck a nerve like that.

  And, in fact, though Hornaday fought like a demon for decades, the fight against automatic and pump guns was one that he mostly lost. The hunters argued that it didn’t matter how game was killed, if hunters just killed to their legal limit. But Hornaday responded that these weapons promoted the maximum amount of killing, creating a new class of killer known as a “game hog,” and also left appalling numbers of animals crippled or dying in the woods. “Anti-machine-gun bills” were introduced in every state legislature where Hornaday was encouraged to do so, but he almost never succeeded in getting them passed. Finally, in 1934, President Franklin Roosevelt issued a new hunting regulation that reduced the capacity of repeating shotguns down to three shots at one blast. This was, Hornaday wrote, “tardy and imperfect fruit, much too late . . . three shots are 33 percent too many.”15

  In 1931, Hornaday’s angry screed Thirty Years War for Wild Life was published. It was meant as a kind of strategic update on Our Vanishing Wild Life, published nineteen years earlier. The book laid out, in depressing detail, what had happened during the past two decades of war, how the enemy was currently positioned, and what Hornaday felt the most pressing tactical goals should be. Despite all the successes, the story it told was grim, and as usual, Hornaday made no particular effort to conceal his rage. “This volume is ‘polite literature,’ ” he wrote, “but if there needs to be a next one, it is going to be so impolite as to demand judgement on all men and organizations who attempt to block the road to constructive conservation. . . . There will be either some sweeping reforms, or a sweeping disaster!”16

  Just take a look at the basic math, he told his readers. In the 1931 hunting season, forty-eight huge armies, in the forty-eight states, would take to the woods and fields of the United States. These armies were immense and terrifying: the number of licensed hunters amounted to nearly 6.5 million, and when added to the 1.5 million unlicensed hunters who legally hunted local game on their own land, the grand total amounted to more than 7.5 million well-armed and well-equipped gunners. This was equivalent to “7,500 regiments of full strength, a number far exceeding all the active standing armies in the world!” (italics in original). Compared to the time less than two decades earlier when Our Vanishing Wild Life was written, this represented a 400 percent increase in the numbers of hunters taking to the field. Where did any thinking person suppose all this would eventually lead? Hornaday wanted to know. And what, if anything, was to be done about it?17

  William Temple Hornaday intended to spend the last years of his life doing something about it, no matter what the personal cost, and no matter how many enemies he might make along the way. His foes claimed that “Hornaday wants to stop all hunting,” or that “Hornaday offers bag-limits as the one cure-all and panacea for the disappearance of game.” Well, he retorted, he was certainly no sentimentalist, and he certainly did not want to put a complete end to hunting. In fact, he wrote, “no other person living has published as many lists of the various causes of game disappearance, or of the different things to be done for game salvage, as W.T. Hornaday has done, from 1897 down to 1930.”18

  All he wanted to do was save the wildlife of North America, a birthright to all those who were born here and all the future generations to come. His intentions were not veiled or secretive—far from it, in fact. He’d nailed them to the door in Our Vanishing Wild Life, as Martin Luther had, and now, in Thirty Years War, he nailed them up there again, for all the world to see. They were as bold, straightforward, and plainspoken as he was:

  Stop the sale of wild game, everywhere.

  Stop all shooting of birds in winter and spring.

  Stop the use of “pump” and “automatic” guns in hunting.

  Stop all shooting of shore birds, doves, robins, and squirrels as “game” and “food.”

  Reduce all bag limits from 50 to 75 per cent.

  Shorten all open seasons at least 50 per cent.

  Stop, all over the world, the killing of birds for commercial or millinery purposes.

  Establish 5- or 10-year close seasons for all endangered species.19

  It was, in effect, a bold and ambitious battle plan to make the world safe for the wild things. To accomplish this, more close-quarters combat would be required than any one person could ever execute, even someone as tireless as Hornaday. It would take decades, or even centuries, to achieve. But it had to be done. Because through long and bitter experience, William Temple Hornaday was convinced that the enemies of wildlife had not been defeated.

  They had just paused to reload.

  EPILOGUE

  His Indomitable Persistence

  On the pale winter afternoon of January 4, 1937, an ailing, nearly crippled, eighty-three-year-old William Temple Hornaday began dictating a long letter to someone he considered an old friend, whom he nonetheless addressed with appropriate diffidence as “His Excellency, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States.”1

  That same day, a grainy black-and-white close-up of FDR graced the cover of the latest issue of Life magazine. The long story inside was essentially a congratulatory victory lap for Roosevelt’s frenetic first term in office, describing the popular president as “a triumphant hero with a smile of silver and a voice of gold.” In other news stories, the prominent modernist clergyman Harry Emerson Fosdick was quoted as predicting that “war, in time, will go the way of torture chambers, religious persecution, slavery, and a hundred other social ills that once ruled the world.”2 Meanwhile, it was reported that in Germany, a twenty-one-year-old Dutch stonemason named Marinus Van Der Lubbe was beheaded after confessing to setting a fire in the Reichstag. The executioner, wearing evening clothes and white gloves, pushed a button on the scaffold and Van Der Lubbe’s head rolled into a pail of sawdust. The new German chancellor, a gloomy little man named Adolf Hitler, blamed the communists for the fire and vowed revenge.

  For Hornaday, what was happening in Europe was another frightful menace about which the world needed to be warned. But by now, after forty years of fighting, Hornaday was growing weary, and his body was failing. Besides the neuritis that plagued his feet and legs, he was tormented by arthritis, by cataracts, and by ill-fitting dentures. Every day was a cavalcade of pain. Still, he longed to be back on his feet and back in the fight. He wrote to his nephew Willis:

  The doctors are completely baffled. I have been most searchingly examined by a famous nerve expert of New York who is an old friend of mine, who after he had finished his second investigation rose wearily and said to the other doctor in consultation, “There is nothing the matter with this man except those damn legs.”

  Above the hips, Hornaday told Willis, “I am sound as a nut.”3

  Meanwhile, although his beloved wife, Josephine, also was growing feeble with age, their devotion to each other had never faltered. In 1929, the New York Tribune ran a story about the Hornadays’ fifty-yea
r wedding anniversary. Two professors at Stanford had come out with a controversial study claiming that the men of America were being “feminized” by their wives, but if that was so, Hornaday said, it wasn’t hurting them. “I hate domineering men and I don’t admire domineering women. It should be a fifty-fifty proposition.” Because of the fact that he and Josephine “scrupulously and honestly respected each other’s rights,” they had not had a quarrel in half a century, he said.4

  Yet despite all the successes and accolades of his life, there were times in the previous years when Hornaday saw clearly how badly his war for wildlife was going, and he succumbed to despair. More and more, he took to referring to his life’s work as “The Thankless Task.”

  “I am too tired to think about our wildlife protection campaign,” he’d written his friend Edmund Seymour a few years earlier, “but I do know that the general situation is 90 per cent hopeless.”5

  Now, on what he knew would soon become his deathbed—his life would end here on this pillow two months later—he summoned the strength for one last appeal. This time, he wished to address “His Excellency” on behalf of all the glorious migratory waterfowl of the United States, which he desperately feared were going the way of the heath hen, the passenger pigeon, the auk, and all the other vanished species of the earth.

  “Because of our long acquaintance and unbroken friendship,” Hornaday began, dictating to a secretary named Betty who was seated beside the bed.6 He hoped that President Roosevelt “would be willing to grant me a brief interview if I were well enough to stand on my feet and go to Washington to call on you in person.” But this was utterly impossible, owing to the fact that he was now bedridden and “secretly and confidentially, I am thinking that the miseries I am undergoing here in my bed will finish me pretty soon by nervous exhaustion. It may easily happen that this is the last letter that you will ever receive from your long-time but faithful and sincere friend.”