Cannery Row (1945) by John Steinbeck

 I finally checked off a long pending item on my reading list, John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, published in 1945.[1]Cannery Row is the story of life on a small stretch of street based on Ocean View Ave. in Steinbeck’s home town of Monterrey, California. Ocean Ave. has since been renamed Cannery Row. Although he cheekily declares in his dedication that all characters “are, of course, fictions and fabrications,” they are indeed modeled on Monterey residents the author knew. Doc, the main protagonist is a facsimile of Ed Ricketts, a noted California scientist and the author’s closest friend, to whom the book is dedicated. Other characters, like Mack and his band of homeless men and Lee Chong, the Chinese grocer, are likewise depictions of people in Steinbeck’s acquaintance. Like other Steinbeck novels, Cannery Row depicts individuals living on the margins of society.[2]

 

Honestly, I did not enjoy the book but struggled to put my finger on the exact reason why until I read a contemporary review of Cannery Row by Joseph Warren Beach in The Virginia Quarterly Review. Among other things, Warren criticizes Steinbeck’s “soap-boxing for a way of life which he demonstrates to be precarious and unsatisfying.”[3] This really hit the mark for me. There is too much of a romantic flavor to the lives of Mack and the boys. I make no claims to be an expert on homelessness or life on the streets, but I do know it is a terribly difficult and rough existence filled with risk and danger, not a romantic rebellion against the dehumanizing aspects of a capitalist/industrial society. 

 

My strongest personal connection with the story was not Steinbeck’s “soap-boxing” but with Doc’s work. He is a naturalist who collects specimens, like frogs, octopi, and starfish, that he ships to his clients for research purposes from his lab, Western Biological. As many roads to me seem to lead back to my pal William T. Hornaday, so did this one. As a young man, Hornaday served in the employ of Henry A. Ward’s Natural History Establishment in Rochester, New York. Between 1874 and 1879 a young Hornaday travelled to Florida, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, the Middle East, and south Asia in search of specimen’s that Ward sold to the ballooning number of museums in American cities and universities in the decades following the Civil War. While Doc sent live animals for scientific research, Ward shipped skeletons, skins, and taxidermically-prepared (a.k.a. “stuffed”) specimens as learning objects. At a time before zoos access to most animals was limited to their remains – a fact that Hornaday would work to change in his twenty-five-year reign as director of the New York Zoological Park, more commonly called the Bronx Zoo.[4]

 

I doubt Hornaday, or Ward, for that matter, would appreciate the comparison. Both were men of the Victorian age in which they lived and upheld its rigid moral code. Certainly, they would have denounced Doc’s proto-Beatnik/Hippie lifestyle. They certainly would look at Mack and the boys with undisguised contempt. Steinbeck might have sympathetically portrayed them as noble individuals who refused to be cowed by the capitalist economy into a robotic existence, but Hornaday and Ward would be repulsed by their lack of morality, thirst for drink, unwillingness to work for their keep, and their abandonment of their families. In other words, their having forsaken any sense of responsibility. Hornaday, who was an outspoken supporter of 100% Americanism during World War I, would undoubtedly have described Mack and the boys as slackers, or much worse, during World War II.

 

 

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[1] John Steinbeck, Novels 1942-1952 (New York: The Library of America, 2002).

[2] San Jose State University, “Cannery Row – Critical Reception,” Steinbeck in the Schools, August 23, 2020, https://sits.sjsu.edu/curriculum-resources/cannery-row/critical-reception/.

[3] Joseph Warren Beach, "SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS ANTIDOTE." The Virginia Quarterly Review 21, no. 2 (1945): 291. Accessed August 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26441972.

[4] See Gregory J. Dehler, The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday & His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).

Academic scare of my life!

In 1907 Crane & Company of Topeka, Kansas published ex-buffalo hunter John Cook’s memoir Border and the Buffalo. Cook’s book stands out in the historiography of the buffalo literature for its singular account of General Philip Sheridan advising the Texas state legislature in 1875 to abandon an effort to protect the buffalo. Cook quotes Sheridan as praising the buffalo hunters for advancing civilization, taming the Native Americans, and making the Great Plains habitable for white settlers, their farms, and livestock. Moreover, in Cook’s telling Sheridan advises that the legislators supply the buffalo hunters with ammunition to aid them in their service to manifest destiny. Cook’s story with his juicy Sheridan “quote”, implying that the US Army supported the buffalo slaughter as a total war measure to destroy the Native American resistance was repeated all through the secondary literature on the buffalo all throughout the twentieth century. And, I will confess that I too cited this “quote” in my master’s thesis. 

In American Serengeti— a most enjoyable history of the charismatic megafauna of the Great Plains — environmental historian Dan Flores discredits Cook’s account. Granted, he is not the first historian to do so. At the least Cook’s story is an uncorroborated tale that cannot be verified in any other source, and at worst is a total fabrication. Flores sees the use of the Cook quote as an example of how untrained popular historians trusted a source too uncritically and kept repeating the error decade after decade. 

This is the context in which I got the scare of my academic life. As I was listening to the audiobook of American Serengtion my noon walk I got hit like a bolt out of the clear blue with the biggest shock of my academic life. Here are the words: “It has appeared in books as recent as a 2012 biography of William T. Hornaday himself (p. 122).” The “It” is in reference to Cook’s fabricated story. This scared the living hell out me because all I could think of is that this might be a reference to my biography of Hornaday, Most Defiant Devil(MDD). Now, I have to say that MDDwas published in 2013, but I did not catch the year in my initial hearing. Did I somehow quote Cook’s Sheridan, even though I knew it was suspicious? Was I so bogged down in all the other details that I somehow missed some old note card made its way on into the manuscript? As soon as I returned to my office, I pulled the copy of MDDoff my shelf and was relieved to find that this was no reference to MDD. Instead, Flores was referring to Stefan Bechtel’s Mr. Hornaday’s War, another example of a popular historian who did not consider the sources critically. What’s more, Bechtel cites a website for the quote, not even the original source. Although I was greatly relieved that Flores was referring to another biography, I must candidly admit that I was sorely disappointed that he had not consulted mine! 

William T. Hornaday on Hetch-Hetchy

Here is an item from the cutting room floor, so-to-speak, that never made its way into The Most Defiant Devil. It seems fitting to mention it after the pervious post on Hetch-Hetchy. Hornaday focused his attention like a laser beam on wildlife conservation. He did not engage in conservation issues outside of those that related directly to wildlife, but that did not mean that he was inattentive. A hard-hitting and fiery campaigner unafraid to sling mud, if not worse, his comments about John Muir are not surprising. The excerpt below comes from a letter Hornaday wrote to Henry Fairfield Osborn on November 8, 1913. Osborn, a paleontologist who served as president of the New York Zoological Society and president of the American Museum of Natural History was a friend of John Muir. I don't know if Hornaday and Muir ever met. They served on the same committee in a conservation congress held in Indianapolis in 1912, but I have no evidence that Muir actually attended. Hornaday wrote:

"It seems to me that the Hetch-Hetchy campaign is sadly missing the bullseye. There is too much firing into the air, instead of firing at guilty men! There is some ginger in the campaign; but only about 10 per-cent of what there should be. It is within the power of the managers to make the enemies of Yosemite National Park hurt .... in mighty short order; but the managers don't seem to know how to do the trick. It is significant that the managers of the campaign feel that they are so nearly beaten that they are directing their appeals to President Wilson."

It is interesting to think of how Hornaday might have handled the campaign to save Hetch-Hetchy differently from Muir.

The above excerpt is from the Hornaday papers at the Bronx Zoo, outgoing correspondence, vol. 6, page 422. The omitted words are due to the fact this is an old note in pencil and there are two words I could not make out in my notes.

100 years ago, William Temple Hornaday and the Migratory Bird Treaty

One hundred years ago this week the United States and Great Britain ratified the Migratory Bird Treaty, which extended protection of migratory birds from the Rio Grande to the arctic. William Temple Hornaday was instrumental at several key points on the road to this landmark act of international conservation.

His first important contribution was to call a dinner of key conservationists in September 1912 to discuss the stalled Weeks-McLean bill. Led by John Burnham of the American Game Protection Association (AGPA), sportsmen lobbied for a bill to protect migratory game birds. In other words, their proposed legislation would protect only birds that hunters wanted to shoot. Hornaday was critical of this approach. For starters, he felt that the bill was too narrow in focus. He advocated a bill that protected all migratory birds, including non-game song birds. Moreover, he did not trust Burnham who represented an organization that was funded by the gun and ammunition manufacturers. This was more than a conflict of interest. Hornaday believed Burnham and his overlords posioned the very soul of the conservation movement and threatened the future of American wildlife. Because of his zeal, Honraday and Burnham had several public and acrimonious skirmishes in the the last couple of years -- indeed, they would spend the next two decades in a protracted knock-out, drag-out fight that led to a lawsuit . At the September dinner Hornaday and T. Gilbert Pearson advocated the expansion of the bill to include all migratory birds. They conveniently waited to vote on it until after Burnham had left. Those who remained voted to accept their revision and the bill was recast to protect all migratory birds.

Hornaday lobbied hard throughout the fall of 1912 for the bill, and his greatest contribution was his seminal book, Our Vanishing Wildlife. Unique in the early conservation canon as a work dedicated exclusively to wildlife conservation, Our Vanishing Wildlife was written in a strident moral tone, full of exclamation points and sarcasm, and with the full-throttle vigor of the most successful muckrakers. Hornaday shined a bright light on the "army of destruction" as he called, which included the game hogs and market hunters, but also the sportsmen whom Burnham represented at the AGPA. Our Vanishing Wildlife had one significant drawback, however. It used racism to argue for migratory bird protection. Southern Congressmen opposed the Weeks-McLean Act because it would extend federal power into an area that had always been reserved to the states. To counter this, Hornaday depicted African Americans, Native Americans, and Italian immigrants in the worse possible light as game hogs extraordinaire. Photographs showing groups of southern blacks walking armed across a field was clearly designed to provoke the worst fears of the Jim Crow era in the hope that the Southern Congressmen would support the bill. In the end, it was a parliamentary maneuver that secured protection of migratory birds. The measure was tucked in an appropriations bill, and signed by President William Howard Taft in the closing minutes of his administration in 1913. Taft later commented that he would not have signed the bill had he known the migratory bird protection measure had been added to it.

Not surprisingly, conservationists were worried about the future of migratory bird protection. It passed Congress through legislative sleight-of-hand and the president who signed it stated he would not have done so had he known that the migratory bird protection provision was buried in the bill. Congress was already backing away by not providing the necessary funds for implementation or hiring the required game wardens. A constitutional challenge seemed imminent, and conservationists  feared that the conservative United States Supreme Court would strike down the measure. As an alternative to amending the constitution Senator Elihu Root of New York recommended a treaty as a way to ensure constitutionality of migratory bird protection. Under article VI, a treaty becomes the supreme law of the land. This approach made great sense because international borders made no more difference to migratory birds than did state boundaries.

The Wilson administration was cool to the idea and had to be pushed into negotiations. Conservationists suggested approaching Mexico, but political instability and revolution eliminated that possibility. By necessity, the United States turned to its northern neighbor, Canada. Great Britain managed the foreign affairs of Canada. With war waging in Europe, a treaty about migratory birds had low priority. If anything pushed Britain to consider the treatyl it was simply to appease the United States. Still negotiations dragged on.

Hornaday grew impatient with the slow progress of the treaty. On February 12, 1916 he walked into the United States State Department in Washington and demanded to know the physical location of the treaty. The clerk found a receipt that he had been delivered to the British embassy the year before. Hornaday proceeded to the British embassy. The treaty, he wrote to Theodore Palmer of the Biological Survey (forerunner of the Fish and Wildlife Service), "by an accident had been filed without any action, and forgotten!" Although Hornaday had a penchant for publicly exposing and embarrassing rivals, he chose not to publicize the bureaucratic mishap at the embassy. This was not the time to embarrass a treaty partner! "Of course you will immediately recognize the necessity of saying nothing whatever about the accident at the embassy," Hornaday added to Palmer.

Hornaday's visit to the embassy got the treaty back on track. Six months later both powers ratified it, although it took another two years for Congress to pass the necessary enabling legislation. In 1920 the United States Supreme Court upheld the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (1918) in the case of Missouri vs. Holland, thus preserving one of the most important pieces of wildlife protection in American history. In 1936 Mexico and the United States signed a migratory bird treaty.  

Ota Benga, part 2, Pamela Newkirk's Spectacle

While September 1906 represented just one month in William T. Hornaday’s 82 years on this earth, it was the central event in Ota Benga’s tragic life story, which ended in suicide in a Virginia barn in 1916. Pamela Newkirk’s Spectacle re-examines Ota Benga’s biography with great sensitivity to the isolation and humiliation that he endured in a foreign land so far from home. At the time, Ota Benga’s seemingly erratic behaviors were written up in sensationalized accounts as examples of his “savagery.” Newkirk points out that the behaviors Ota Benga exhibited were not unlike those demonstrated by individuals who had undergone extreme deprivation and torture. She restores his humanity and her book clearly replaces Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume Ota: The Pygmy in the Zoo (New York: Dell, 1992).

Indeed, Benga must have been a very challenging subject for a biographer. Unlike Hornaday who left tens of thousands of pages of published and unpublished documents (which presented challenges of a very different sort), Ota Benga left nothing. His life has to be pieced together from unreliable contemporary sources, such as newspapers and the writings of both Hornaday and Samuel Verner, Benga’s guardian, for lack of a better term. Besides sharing the common racial prejudices of time, newspapers published highly sensationalized accounts that reflected their dubious sources (i.e. Hornaday) for background information. Hornaday and Verner had too much self-interest invested to be objective; they wanted to create promotional stories and profit, not tell an accurate or unbiased account of Ota Benga’s life. As Newkirk points out, Verner was far from the most reputable character, and he deserves much blame for the abuse his charge suffered.   

What this book taught me is that I should have been much more suspicious of Hornaday’s version of the incident and his accounts of Ota Benga’s life and story in The Most Defiant Devil. Ultimately, however, I stand by my position on the events of September 1906, which is to say that Hornaday alone does not deserve all the blame for this terrible moment in the history of a great city and a great institution. Like many before me, I think I might have treated Ota Benga as too peripheral to the story. I am very grateful that Pamela Newkirk has filled a void by telling the story from perspective of Ota Benga.

AHA Conference Review: Saturday January 4, 2014, 11:30-1:30 pt 1

Now it was my turn to present at the AHA Conference. My paper "Disagreement, Debate, and Discussion over the Meaning of Nature Protection: Wildlife Conservationists and the Battle over the Migratory Bird Conservation Act of 1929" was first up in our panel A Place to Play: Outdoor Recreation and Environmental Conflict in the Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century United States. Thank you to Jonathan Anzalone for organizing our panel and including me.

My paper focused on a little known, but I feel important, piece of legislation to create wildlife refuges that dragged on for most of the 1920s. My argument is that this bitter debate between different groups of wildlife protectionists shattered a coalition that had achieved striking success in the decade before the introduction of the refuge bill. In short, the goals that the preservationist wing (led by William Hornaday) and the sportsmen or utilitarian wing (led by John Burnham) differed in fundamental ways, which created mistrust between the two groups. I won't say anymore; you can read the full version below.

My presentation did not go as well as I would have liked. For some reason, I stumbled over several words and lost my place once or twice. I felt I was reading too fast, even though several practice runs at a slower pace had me coming in well within the time limit.

The theme of our conference today is “disagreement, debate, and discussion.” My paper focuses on the disagreement, debate, and discussion within the conservation movement over three bills between 1923 and 1929 to establish federal migratory bird refuges. In the short term, this acrimonious, internecine battle stalled an important piece of legislation. This delay exacerbated the conditions that the legislation sought to relieve. In the long term, it wrecked a coalition that had only a decade before achieved historic victories to protect American birds.

First, it needs to be stated that all wildlife conservationists supported the main effort of the legislation to create migratory bird refuges. Refuges were deemed essential to meeting the obligations of the landmark 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act with Canada, and for creating breeding and propagation safe havens for a variety of bird species. Led by Chief Edwin Nelson, the federal Bureau of Biological Survey expressed its growing alarm over the devastating effects that increased drainage of marshland for farming was having on critical migratory bird breeding habitat. If they agreed on the importance and purposes of creating refuges, what then did wildlife protectionists argue about for almost an entire decade? First, they disagreed about how to pay for refuge acquisition. This was no small consideration. A sustainable and reliable source of revenue was necessary to construct a flourishing refuge system. Who paid for land purchases opened up the second question, which was, should hunters receive special access to the refuges, since migratory game birds were an important economic asset?

As John Reiger points out in his seminal American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation, the early enlightened hunters – men like George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt -- supported forest and water conservation largely because they understood the importance of habitat to the protection of their game. By 1921 many sportsmen concluded that they deserved to enjoy the fruit of their conservation labors after several decades of hard work. Their leading spokesperson was John Bird Burnham, president of the American Game Protection Association (AGPA), [and this is a very important part of the story] a conservation organization financed by a conglomeration of gun and ammunition manufacturing companies such as DuPont, Remington, and Winchester. Burnham also served as the chairman of the influential Migratory Bird Advisory Board, which was created in 1913 to advise the secretary of agriculture on federal hunting policy and regulations. Burnham believed that American wildlife was in what he in 1923, called, “a vigorous and hopeful renaissance,” largely due to the efforts of sportsmen to put sound conservation measures in the local, state, and federal statute books. Echoing his idol Theodore Roosevelt, Burnham wanted hunting to be an accessible sport to all Americans, not just the wealthy who could afford costly excursions to remote areas. He wished to expand, as he said, "the [American] system that aims to preserve for all the people the benefits that otherwise will accrue only to those blessed with considerably more that an average share of wealth."

Burnham envisioned a refuge system paid for by hunters through a $1 federal license to shoot migratory waterfowl. He reasoned that if sportsmen financed the refuges, they should benefit from them in the form of public shooting grounds on or adjacent to the refuges. Public shooting grounds would provide good hunting opportunities to Americans of all income levels.

In 1921 Senator Harry New of Indiana and Congressman Daniel Anthony of Kansas introduced a bill written by John Burnham that included the $1 hunting license and public shooting grounds. To increase the popularity of their bill in rural areas they packaged it as relief to the farmers and landowners who felt besieged by hunters requesting access to their land. Burnham marshaled almost unanimous support for this legislation from within the conservation movement, including the National Association of Audubon Societies. One prominent conservationist, however, was absent from the roster of supporters. In what was a strange display of apathy on his part, William Temple Hornaday, the irascible Director of the Bronx Zoo, didn’t think it necessary to get involved because he reasoned that the bill could not possibly pass the Congress. This proved to be an accurate prediction. Although it cleared the Senate, it failed in the House. Those who voted nay did so largely because they opposed the federal government purchasing lands within the states and requiring a license to shoot migratory waterfowl.

If Hornaday had not been thinking deeply about the New-Anthony Bill, he did formulate his own proposals for hunting regulation. He envisioned himself as the representative of the millions of Americans who did not hunt. This predominately urbanite constituency mirrored the 44 million people who visited the zoo over his thirty-year tenure. Unlike Burnham, Hornaday believed American wildlife was in a state of precipitous and dangerous decline. He was alarmed by the growing numbers of hunters who took the field, like so many George Babbitts, with their new gadgets, more effective guns, and most especially their automobiles that granted them unprecedented access. He knew he could not stop them from taking the field, but be believed strongly that some restrictions could counter the negative effects that growing numbers of hunters were having on wildlife populations. At the December 1923 meeting of the Migratory Bird Advisory Board, Hornaday introduced a measure to reduce the daily bag limits on duck and geese. Although he was voted down by the decisive vote of 16-2, the issue of bag limits became thoroughly entangled with discussion of the migratory bird refuge legislation.

In early December 1924 Hornaday and Edwin Nelson met at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City to discuss bag limits. Nelson felt caught between rival conservation factions. On the one hand he did not want to anger the hunters. The federal government had too few wardens and Nelson was forced to rely mostly on their voluntary compliance to fairly new and not necessarily popular federal hunting regulations. On the other hand, Nelson gave some consideration to Hornaday’s position that waterfowl populations were declining in number, if only because it seemed the logical effect of shrinking breeding grounds. Before committing himself, however, Nelson wanted to conduct a population survey. In 1925 he issued a report that supported Burnham’s position wildlife increase and claimed that game populations were in fact increasing between 10 and 200 percent depending on location. As a result of this report Hornaday came to view Nelson as a dishonest broker standing in the camp of the gun makers and their minion, John Burnham. As Chairman of the Permanent Wildlife Protection Fund — a well endowed organization of which he was essentially the only member — Hornaday issued a press release that found its way into a front page article in the New York Times. Hornaday publicly proclaimed that Burnham and Nelson were nothing less than "paid agents of the big corporations who make and sell guns and ammunition." The tone of Hornaday’s inflammatory comments weighed heavy on the wildlife protection community. While not defending Burnham, some newspapers felt that Hornaday’s rhetoric was entirely too scathing and too personal. Two years later Burnham successfully sued Hornaday for libel over the press release.

Within several weeks of Hornaday’s attack on Burnham, a convention of state game commissioners met in Denver, Colorado. The atmosphere was tense bordering on hostile. "A gleaming spear was poised at every tepee entrance," T. Gilbert Pearson, the secretary of the Audubon Society, wrote later. Through several difficult meetings the factions forged a deal, referred to as the Madsen Compromise, after Utah game commissioner David Madsen that removed the hunting license provision from the refuge bill. This compromise would give the sportsmen the public shooting grounds they demanded and Hornaday an alternative revenue stream he demanded. Ironically, neither Hornaday nor Burnham trusted the other enough to support the deal. Hornaday felt that without a bag limit reduction to offset the public shooting grounds, the compromise was nothing more than an empty gesture designed only to disarm him and his supporters. "John Burnham's influence for evil is perfectly amazing," he wrote in disgust to Will Dilg of the Izaak Walton League. To an extent, Hornaday was correct to be suspicious. Burnham openly admitted to friends that he felt no obligation to be bound by the "compromise" for he felt that, as he wrote, one correspondent, that Hornaday and his allies had "laid a trap" for him in Denver.  As the two most dominating, powerful, and respected personalities in the wildlife protection movement grew more divided they drowned out the vast majority in the middle who were willing to work with each other in good faith.

            In 1926 a migratory bird refuge bill was re-introduced into the Congress with the hunting license and public shooting grounds provisions. Supporters were cautiously optimistic that it would pass this time. Capturing this mood, T. Gilbert Pearson of the Audubon Society wrote to Frank Chapman in February 1926, “Altogether I feel the situation is pretty good for its passage this year, if no one of a dozen or more flourishing monkey-wrenches do not happen to land in the works.” Inopportunely Hornaday lobbed such a monkey wrench in the form of a bill sponsored by Senator Royal Copeland of New York and Representative Schuyler Merritt of Connecticut to reduce bag limits. Hornaday viewed the reduction as absolutely essential to equalize the impact of the proposed public shooting grounds, but it seemed to his adversaries as nothing more than an irresponsible provocation. The bag limit bill was highly controversial among conservationists because it challenged the Progressive Era assumptions that policy was best made by interested parties and trained experts. Putting nuts and bolts wildlife management decisions in the hands of untutored Congressmen seemed downright dangerous.

On April 29, 1926, during a debate on the Migratory Bird Refuge bill in the House, New York Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia denounced the public shooting grounds proposal as a sham, “under the guise of conservation.” Then he proceeded to read into the Congressional Record excerpts of confidential correspondence between John Burnham and the bigwigs of the gun and ammunition manufacturing firms. Burnham wrote in one such missive in 1924, "The sentimentalists led by Doctor Hornaday are demanding cuts in the bag limits and seasons, which if carried to the logical conclusion means the reduction of shooting opportunities to the vanishing point. Of course, if this happens, the sale of firearms and ammunition will be seriously affected." Such comments impeached Burnham's credibility, and seemingly validated all that Hornaday had been saying about the conflict of interest between Burnham's role as Chairman of the Migratory Bird Advisory Board and his position as president of the conservation organization funded by the nation's largest gun and ammunition corporations. Speaking of the effect of the publication of Burnham's correspondence on the pending legislation, Massachusetts state Ornithologist and stalwart Hornaday ally Edward Howe Forbush commented, "If he wrote those letters, he has killed the game refuge bill."

Four weeks later Hornaday announced his retirement as Director of the Bronx Zoo, a position he had held since 1896. It was rumored at the time that he had in fact been forced to resign. Frederic Walcott of the Bronx Zoo's Board of Managers wrote that Hornaday had paid what he called “the extreme penalty” for both the bag limit proposal and the LaGuardia attack. Over the course of three decades Burnham and George Bird Grinnell wrote often to Hornaday's superiors at the zoo, arguing that the Director's inflammatory public comments embarrassed their pubic-spirited, family oriented organization. Burnham must have felt enormous satisfaction when he learned that his adversary had finally received his just desserts.

Regardless of what was rumored at the time, it is open to debate if the seventy-one year old director was pushed out or retired on his own accord. Nevertheless, Hornaday’s departure from the zoo did not diminish his voice or dampen his vigorous opposition to public shooting grounds. The House voted down the migratory bird refuge bill shortly after LaGuardia's performance. After failing for the second time to shepherd a favorable migratory bird refuge bill through the Congress, the gun and ammunition corporations withdrew their funding from Burnham's AGPA. Now it was Hornaday's turn to feel immense satisfaction at his rival's fall from grace.

In January 1928 Senator Peter Norbeck, a progressive Republican from South Dakota, introduced a migratory bird refuge bill. Hornaday saw Norbeck as an honest player and wrote to the Senator to inform him that his proposed legislation based on the principles of the New-Anthony bill, “is not at all the good-conservation bill that you think it is.” Furthermore, Hornaday appealed to the senator’s progressivism by declaring in a bit of overstatement that the public shooting grounds provision would “put the federal government into the business of founding and maintaining duck-shooting resorts.” Convinced that the most important feature of the bill was refuge creation, Norbeck responded that in his bill only 10-30 percent of the refuges would have public shooting grounds. This mollified Hornaday who accepted it as something of a compromise. But Hornaday’s adversaries were alarmed by his seeming influence on Norbeck. Carlos Avery, an ally of Burnham’s, warned the senator to be careful of taking advice from Hornaday, “because if you do there will be not much left of the bill.” As it turned out, Avery was right to be concerned. Daily Norbeck received disheartening letters from all the key players in the wildlife protection movement expressing vehement support for one provision or another and casting aspersions on other conservationists. Surprised and exasperated over such infighting over what he considered secondary issues, Norbeck barked to Edmund Seymour of the Camp-Fire Club and a staunch Hornaday ally, “I am for the Sanctuary bill with our without shooting grounds.”

If Norbeck found the conservationists frustrating to deal with, his colleagues in the Senate presented additional obstacles. It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine them in detail, but in the end Norbeck’s bill was amended to resemble all that Hornaday had wanted. The public shooting grounds provision and hunting license were struck from the bill. Instead, treasury would pay for land requisition like any other Congressional appropriation. The revised migratory bird refuge bill passed the Senate in late 1927 by a unanimous vote, a fact that Hornaday described in his memoirs, Thirty Years War for Wildlife, as, “an AMAZING MIRACLE.” The bill’s sponsor did not share Hornaday’s sense of triumph. To the contrary, the former governor and experienced legislator vented, “I am frankly sick over the whole situation.” “I have wasted so much effort on this matter and I look upon it as the biggest failure I have ever been connected with,” he wrote to another. Norbeck vowed that he would not lift a finger to get a comparable version through the House.

Hornaday feared that Burnham and his allies would outflank him in the House by restoring the hunting license and public shooting grounds provisions in the lower chamber and then using the conference committee to refashion the Senate bill. Speaking on behalf of the National Committee of 100 – a lobbying front he formed with Edmund Seymour after retiring from the Bronx Zoo in 1926 – Hornaday launched what could only be described as a media blitz in support of the Senate version. This vociferous campaign throughout 1928 made the Committee into something of an obnoxious pariah. Even Hornaday's ardent admirer, author Thornton Burgess, commented that he was "bitterly assailed" for being associated with such an organization and that "men whom I had long looked up to, and whose regard and good opinion I cherished, turned against me."

Hornaday’s fears proved unfounded. The entire conservation movement was too tired and drained by the long battle to fight anymore over these issues. There remained absolute consensus on the need for refuges, and the devastating effects of drainage and drought had only worsened. On February 9, it passed the House unanimously by a vote of 219-0. President Coolidge signed it shortly thereafter.  Within a decade, the migratory bird refuge system consisted of 85 refuges containing nearly 700,000 acres.

Hornaday had won an impressive victory against difficult odds, but his success came at a price. The conflict between he and Burnham, which they both must share blame, wrecked and exhausted a powerful coalition of scientists, sportsmen, nature enthusiasts, bird watchers, and urbanites, who had achieved so much working together, during the progressive era. A decade later President Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted a grand bargain of sorts to recast the movement. The result was a duck stamp to pay for land acquisition and a reduction in the bag limit, among other reforms, favored by Hornaday. Structurally, the administration sponsored the National Wildlife Federation, which was designed to serve as an umbrella organization to unite sportsmen and non-sportsmen. Despite these efforts, the coalition could not be resurrected to resemble its former self and the divide between these groups, first sharpened during the debate over the Migratory Bird Refuge Act, echoed throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.