Ota Benga, revisited

On Sunday, August 6th, the New York Time revisted the Ota Benga story in an account by Mitch Keller, The Scandal at the Zoo. The story appeared in the City section of the paper, which is not included in all print editions of the paper. Online, the story will be freely accessible for the next week or so accessible by checking the Region/City section of the Times. A short cut to the story--the direct url is breakably long--is http://tinyurl.com/ena86.

From time to time over the past century, Ota Benga's presence at the Bronx Zoo in September 1906 has created controversy. In recent years, however, the Bronx Zoo has not responded to the controversy in any way other than to apologize for the event. The zoo has made no effort to explain what happened or to correct inaccuracies in published accounts of the Ota Benga episode.

The controversy was renewed in 1992 with the publication of Ota: the Pygmy in the Zoo by Phillips Bradford and Harvey Blume (St. Martin's Press).

Bradford, the grandson of the man who brought Ota Benga to the zoo, continues to host an Ota Benga web page, http://www.concentric.net/~Pvb/otabenga.html.

Shortly after publication of the Bradford and Blume book, creationnists began describing the the Ota Benga story as an example of the fruits of Darwinism. For example, see Jerry Bergman's account, first published in 1993, at Revolution Against Evolution, http://www.rae.org/otabenga.html.

A more recent example comes from Science & Theology News (July 14, 2006)
"Social Darwinian theories posed very real and more imminent dangers. In the United States, copying an “anthropology” exhibit at the World’s Fair of 1904, the Bronx Zoo exhibited a pygmy man named Ota Benga in a cage with “other primates.” Zoo officials wished to create a popular illustration of the evolutionary connections between apes and “lower men.” Zoo director William Hornaday proudly reported that “the little fellow” had “one of the best rooms in the primate house.” Despite some protests from African-American clergy, no one intervened. Benga later committed suicide." (http://www.stnews.org/news-2903.htm).
The breadth of interest in Ota Benga is suggested by a search of Google Books, which recently returned a list of 297 current books (July 25, 2006) in which "Ota Benga" is mentioned.

The September 1906 centennial of Ota Benga's association with the Bronx Zoo is bringing forth new publicity in the form of a forthcoming Sunday Styles story in the New York Times. Other stories will come from Lynchburg, Virginia, where Ota Benga died and is buried in an unknown grave.

Archival records suggest that the founders of the zoo did not seek out Ota Benga as part of a long standing plan to exhibit a person of color in order to disseminate racist and Darwinist notions. Does Ota Benga deserve a memorial in the zoo, as some have suggested? Should the zoo interpret the Ota Benga story in any way other than an apology?

Sources and suggested readings

Incoming and outgoing correspondence, William Hornaday, Office of Director, Bronx Zoo, August-October 1906.

Bridgeman, H. L. Letter to William T. Hornaday, 10 July 1905. Incoming correspondence, William Hornaday, Office of Director, Bronx Zoo.

Hornaday, William T. Letter to H. L. Bridgeman, 15 July 1905, Outgoing correspondence, Office of Director, Bronx Zoo.

Bridges, William, Chapter 12, Man in the Zoo, Gathering of Animals: an unconventional history of the New York Zoological Society.
Keller, Mitch. The scandal at the Zoo. New York Times August 6, 2006, Section 14, pages 1, 8.
Accessible online at http://tinyurl.com/ena86.

Saving the fur seal and ending a friendship

Saving the fur seal and ending a friendship--The fur seal controversy

William Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoo, and Charles Townsend, director of the New York Aquarium, were graduates of Ward's Natural History Establishment in Rochester, New York. Their friendship ended when they took opposing sides in the protracted controversy over the protection of the Alaska fur seal herd. Hornaday allied himself with wildlife activitist Henry Elliot. Townsend was vilified for having accepting a fee in the course of an international arbitration.

Henry Elliot became well known as a wildlife activist for his role in the fur seal controversy. Townsend's role is largely forgotton. What do the roles of Hornaday and Townsend tell us about the organization for which they both worked?
Sources and suggested readings:
The Saving of the Fur Seal Industry, clippings, correspondence, chronologies, summaries; roughly chronologic arrangement, 1909- 1930 (draft index), volumes 4 and 5, Scrapbook Collection on the History of Wild Life Protection and Extermination, from newspapers, magazines and other printed records, ca. 1906-1935 (3 linear feet) 15 volumes. William Hornaday Papers. (Also available on microfilm.)

Fur seals. Charles H.Townsend records, New York Aquarium.

Fairfield Osborn: zoo-based environmental activist

Fairfield Osborn's books, articles, editorials and speeches suggest the direction of the New York Zoological Society during the nineteen forties, fifties and early sixties.

Sources and suggested readings

Books
Our plundered planet. Boston: Little, Brown, 1948.
The limits of the earth. Boston: Little, Brown, 1953.
Our crowded planet, essays on the pressures of population. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1962.

Editorials and articles from Zoological Society Bulletin and Animal Kingdom magazine. Printed copies available in Bronx Zoo Library. Digital copies on request.
Speeches. Printed or typewritten copies available in Fairfield Osborn records, Bronx Zoo Library. Digital copies on request.

Helen Martini's My Zoo Family

Helen Martini worked at the Bronx Zoo's animal nursery from 1943 until 1960. The earliest accounts and photographs of her work with baby animals were published in Animal Kingdom, the zoo's magazine, during the darkest days of World War Two. With the publication of her article "Mother was Human" in Ladies Home Journal (April 1953), she became a minor celebrity. Helen Martin went on to tell the story of her life and work in a best selling book, My Zoo Family (Harper, 1955). She also appeared in short films produced at the Bronx Zoo.

One of Helen Martini's young readers, George Ella Lyon, later became an author of books for children and told Martini's story in the children's book Mother to Tigers (Atheneum, 2003).

Three writers who inspired a generation of naturalists

William Hornaday, William Beebe, and Raymond Ditmars each inspired a generation (or more) to become naturalists and conservationists through the books and articles they wrote mainly during during long careers at the Bronx Zoo.

Beebe has received scholarly recognition for his popular writing. Scholars and bibliographers have paid less attention to Hornaday and to Ditmars. Herpetologists acknowlege the role of Raymond Ditmars as a popularizer, but the only biography, written decades ago, addressed a juvenile audience. Hornaday also was the subject of a biography written for young people. Although two dissertations have addressed the early and later phases of Hornaday's career, emphasizing his conservation activities, and William Bridges treated his life in Gathering of animals, no book length study has addressed his writings.

Sources and suggested readings:

Berra, Tim. William Beebe: An annotated bibliography. Hamden: Archon Books, 1977.

Dehler, Gregory J. An American crusader : William Temple Hornaday and wildllife protection in America, 1840-1940. PhD. dissertation, Lehigh University, 2001.

Dolph, James Andrew. Bringing wildlife to millions : William Temple Hornaday; the early years: 1854-1896. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1975.

Forbes, John Ripley and Kathleen Elgin. In the steps of the great American zoologist: William Temple Hornaday. New York: M. Evans, 1966.

Wood, L.N. Raymond L. Ditmars. His Exciting Career with Reptiles, Animals and Insects. New York: Julius Meissner, 1944.

William Beebe: from zoo curator to field biologist

William Beebe left Columbia University without a degree to become curator of Birds at the Bronx Zoo. His field work on birds took him around the world on to do resarch for his four volume Monograph of the Pheasants. Before the war-delayed book had finished publication, Beebe founded a Department of Tropical Research for the Society and spend most of every year in the field until he died in 1962. He is probably best known for his work with the bathysphere in the early nineteen thirties.

Beebe’s famous quotation about the last specimen of an endangered species is from page 18 of his book The Bird: Its form and function, published by Henry Holt & Company, 1906. Several slight variants of "the quote" exist in various reference works. The original reads as follows. The previous paragraph is included for context.

"Let us beware of needlessly destroying even one of the lives--so sublimely crowning the ages upon ages of evolving; and let us put forth all our efforts to save a threatened species from extinction; to give hearty aid to the last few individuals pitifully struggling to avoid absolute annihilation.

"The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living beings breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again."

How does this concept of wildife protection relate to Beebe's time and to our own?

Sources and suggested readings

Gould, Carol. 2004. The remarkable life of William Beebe : explorer and naturalist. Shearwater Books.

Mattsen, Brad. 2005. Descent: the heroic discovery of the abyss. New York: Pantheon Books.

Fairfield Osborn and the genealogy of conservation organizations

In 1946 the New York Zoological Society established a Conservation Department, which soon became the Conservation Division. In 1948, NYZS spun off the Conservation Division as a separate organization, the Conservation Foundation, with separate board of directors, budget, and endowment. Fairfield Osborn served as president of both the New York Zoological Society and the Conservation Foundation.

The New York Zoological Society and the Conservation Foundation engaged in several joint projects in the nineteen fifties, among them Leopold and Darling's wildlife survey of Alaska. When Fairfield Osborn stepped down as president of the Conservation Foundation, the affiliation ended. Later, the Conservation Foundation merged with the World Wildlife Fund-US. The Conservation Foundation is rarely mentioned today.

Sources and suggested readings

Osborn, Fairfield . The new Conservation Foundation . Animal Kingdom (1948) vol. 51 no. 2 , 34-36.

Conservation Foundation page in Annual reports of the New York Zoological Society for the years 1947 through 1962.

Conservation Foundation pages in most issues of Animal Kingdom from 1948 through 1965.

Osborn, Fairfield. Conservation Foundation correspondence, 1949-1965, WCS archives.

Fairfield Osborn and the rebirth of the New York Zoological Society

Fairfield Osborn was the son of Henry Fairfield Osborn, one of the founders of the New York Zoological Society and it's third president (1909-1925). The younger Fairfield Osborn became the Society's Secretary in 1935. At that time the zoo had changed little since the early nineteen twenties. In1940, only a few years after the deaths of William Hornaday (1937) and Madison Grant (1938), Osborn became president of the Society and led the modernization of exhibits and policies. With the Africa Plains exhibit, the Bronx Zoo finally joined the trend away from cages and toward moated exhibits, years after other zoos in North America. And instead of banning cameras from the park, as under the policy of the founders, the new Bronx Zoo encouraged amateur photographers...and sold film. In this work Fairfield Osborn was closely associated with trustee Laurance Rockefeller.

Sources and suggested readings

Bridges, William. Gathering of Animals, chapter 5, "Fairfield Osborn breaks the old patterns," pages 440-458. Available as download from project page.

Anonymous. An announcement to the members of the Zoological Society . Bulletin of the New York Zoological Society ( 1940 ) vol. 43 no. 4 ,103-104 . Management changes at the New York Zoological Society.

Osborn, Fairfield. The opening of the African Plains . Bulletin of the New York Zoological Society (1941) vol. 44 no. 3 , 66-73 . Illustrated . The moated exhibit arrives at the Bronx Zoo .

Before the Bronx Zoo opened...wildlife survey in Alaska

In 1898, zoo director William Hornaday arranged with Andrew J. Stone to survey the conditions of wildlife in Alaska as an additional mission on his forthcoming collecting expedition to Alaska on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History. Although Stone was not an employee of the Zoological Society, his expedition can be considered the first field expedition of the Society.For the Society, Stone's expedition began more than a century of conservation activity in Alaska.

Andrew Stone is remembered as the namesake of Stone's sheep and as a photographer. He died in a canoe accident. Some of his papers are preserved at the Bancroft Library, University of California-Berkeley.

Sources and suggested readings:

William Hornaday to Andrew Stone, Outgoing letterpress books, Director's Office, Bronx Zoo.

Andrew J. Stone to William Hornaday, Incoming correspondence, Director's office, Bronx Zoo .

Andrew J. Stone . Field notes on the largermammalia of the Stickine, Dease, and Liard rivers, BritishColumbia . Third annual report of the New York Zoological Society ( 1898 ) , pages 53-62 .
Anonymous. A report on the first field research sponsored by the New York Zoological Society .
Zoological Society Bulletin ( 1901 ) vol. 1 no. 5 , 1 .

Madison Grant. The society's expedition to Alaska . Sixth annual report of the New York Zoological Society (1901) , 137-140 . Illustrated . .

Madison Madison . Condition of wildlife in Alaska . Twelth annual report of the New York Zoological Society, 125-134 .

Before the Bronx Zoo opened...survey of wildlife decline

Before the Bronx Zoo opened... a survey of wildlife decline 

In 1897, two years before the Bronx Zoo opened William Hornaday carried out a nationwide postal survey,
asking "persons qualified to answer" four questions:

1. Are birds decreasing in your locality?
2. About how  many are there now in compariosn with the number
fifteen years ago? (one-half as many? one-third? one-fourth?)
3. What agency (or class of men) has been most destructive to the
birds of your locality?
4. What important species of birds or quadrupeds are becoming
extinct in your state?

Hornaday published a detailed report of the survey in the second annual report of the New York Zoological Society. The zoo's archives include the
survey forms returned by Hornaday's respondents.

William Hornaday's questions would not pass muster in contemporary survey research. What do they tell us about the meaning of conservation in William Hornaday's work as director of the yet to be opened Bronx Zoo?

Sources and suggested readings:

Hornaday, William T. The destruction of our birds and mammals: a report on the results of an inquiry. Second annual report of the New York Zoological
Society (1898), pages 77-127.

Report on the decrease of bird life, United States inquiry, 1897. Scrapbook, Director's Office, Bronx Zoo archives.