My history grandparents, part 1 of 3, Allan Nevins

It has been several months since I last saw a tweet or blog posting by someone describing their “history grandparents,” but it is something that I have been pondering for a while. What is my historiographical genealogy and how has it affected my work as an historian? This will be the first of three reflections on the subject. 

I first learned to be an historian at St. John’s University in Jamaica, New York where I earned both my bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Most of my professors earned their PhDs at Columbia University in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their biggest influence was Allan Nevins (1890-1971), a journalist who taught history at Columbia University from 1928 to 1958 and was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History, despite the fact that he had not earned an advanced degree in the subject. If anyone remembers him these days it is likely because of his magnum opus, the six-volume account of the American Civil War entitled the Ordeal of the Union where he argued that extremists on both sides – fire-eaters in the south and abolitionists in the north – created the toxic environment that prevented compromise and led to war. Granted it is completely heinous to lump both slave holders, who wanted to expand bondage, and abolitionists, who wanted to liberate the oppressed, as moral equivalents, but Nevins wrote these works in the shadow of two world wars and in the early years of the Cold War when confrontations and extreme saber rattling over places like Berlin, Korea, obscure islands off the coast of China, Cuba, etc., threatened nuclear war and annihilation. 

Nevins was famously prolific. One of my professors described how Nevins mixed up the drafts of his multiple projects and sent mishmashes of manuscripts to confused publishers. Nevins also could neglect his guests during cocktail and dinner parties so that he could spend more time writing. This might have annoyed some guests, but it impressed the young graduate students who later became my professors.

In addition to Ordeal of the Union, Nevins authored biographies of Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, John C. Fremont, Abram Hewitt, John Rockefeller, and I might be missing one or two others. It is this interest, indeed emphasis, on biography that my professors at St. John’s instilled in me. They understood biography as fundamentally a part of history, not a separate genre. They frequently referred to biographies, as much as histories, in class, discussion, and papers. When a name was mentioned in a paper, they wanted a biographical reference in a footnote. Their syllabi, too, contained biographies and autobiographies. A biographical angle or approach featured prominently in our term papers. My master’s Civil War paper, for example, was about Union general Philip Kearny (1815-1862). In addition to reading the few biographies that existed of him at the time, I travelled to the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark to study Kearny’s papers. 

Biography was also an acceptable topic for a master’s thesis. I really struggled with a topic for mine. The only thing I felt certain about is that I wanted to research and study the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. When I went to Dr. Richard Harmond, my faculty advisor, for advice, he mentioned three people, Speaker of the House Joseph Cannon (1836-1926), nature writer Thornton Burgess (1874-1965), and conservationist and zoologist William T. Hornaday (1854-1937). Being pre-internet, my first stop was the Dictionary of American Biography. Then to the National Union Catalog of Manuscripts. If all else had been equal, I probably would have selected Cannon because of my interest in political history. But, Hornaday’s papers were in the Bronx Zoo, a short drive from my home, and that was the deciding factor. Thus began a twenty-year odyssey with Hornaday that culminated in the publication of The Most Defiant Devil by University of Virginia Press in 2013.

Some historians dismiss biography as only following the “big man” version of events and ignoring larger cultural and social forces at work. There is some truth to this, of course, but human beings do make choices and do shape history just the same. To me, as an historian and biographer myself, they are complimentary, not adversarial, approaches to the study and understanding of the past. I will forever be interested in good historical biographies. I will always want to know who were the actors of the past through accounts of their lives. I am eternally grateful to my professors at St. John’s for showing me this approach to our craft. 

Crusading Spirits: David Brower and William Hornaday

Prior to The Man Who Built the Sierra Club: A Life of David Brower by Robert Wyss published by Columbia University Press in 2016, my most thorough introduction to environmentalist David Brower came from John McPhee’s classic Encounters with the Arch Druid (1971). While it has been a long time since I read McPhee’s account of dialogue between arch-nemesis’ Brower and Bureau of Reclamation Director Floyd Dominy during a rafting trip, Brower came across to me in that work as amiable and casual. That is definitely not that the characterization given by Wyss who, in contrast, depicts Brower as manic, domineering, and demanding. While he may have been charming to meet, he was also a stern taskmaster and troublesome subordinate who followed his own moral compass to the great consternation of his employers who found him difficult to keep focused. As I read through Brower’s life, I kept noting some striking similarities to William Temple Hornaday. Hornaday is not mentioned at all in the index, and I would not be surprised if Brower had never even heard of him in anything more than a passing reference. 

Hornaday focused almost all his conservation efforts exclusively on wildlife while Brower devoted himself primarily to protecting natural landscapes. Like Brower, Hornaday caused his employers at the Bronx Zoo constant headaches. Both Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn were exasperated with Hornaday’s endless fights with everyone over everything. Anything from a seemingly simple exchange of specimens with the American Museum to complex negotiations with the city of New York turned into a brawl. Hornaday’s employers did not appreciate either the stinging barbs that Hornaday, in his zeal for the cause for wildlife protection, directed at his fellow conservations (including someone like George Bird Grinnell who was a close personal friend to Grant) or the fact that battled his adversaries as if it was a no-holds barred street fight. Hornaday publicly shamed and humiliated his adversaries and refused to play by the Queensbury rules when it came to his dealings with the gentleman sportsman. Like Brower’s employers at the Sierra Club, Hornaday’s at the New York Zoological Society eventually decided he was too hot to handle. After a prolonged battle with Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Biological Survey, and John B. Burnham, among others, Hornaday was to some extent forced to retire. 

Like Brower who went on to found Friends of the Earth, Hornaday would not be silenced by the New York Zoological Society. Long before his retirement, he formed the Wildlife Protection Fund, an endowment of $100,000 raised from wealthy contributors, that allowed him the freedom to campaign for his own causes in his own way outside of the auspices and control of the New York Zoological Society. Like Brower’s Friends of the Earth, Hornaday’s organization allowed him to take a much more radical, passionate stance.

Like Brower, Hornaday was a pioneer in the use of media and advertising. When he was with the Sierra Clun Brower produced stunning photography-books and ran full-page ads in major newspapers supporting his causes. Fifty years prior to Brower’s use of these techniques, Hornaday had done similar things. He was the first person to write a book devoted exclusively to wildlife protection, Our Vanishing Wildlife (1913). He also pioneered in the use of photographs in his publications, which was then an expensive and new technology. When Hornaday’s publishers balked at the expense, his wealthy friend and patron Andrew Carnegie financed the projects. Hornaday also used the new medium of film in the cause, such as when he and T. Gilbert Pearson of the Audubon Society showed a clip of egrets being killed and skinned in their lobbying campaign to persuade Congress in 1913 to support a ban on plumage imports as part of Woodrow Wilson’s tariff revision. They were ultimately successful in accomplishing this historic and long-sought objective of wildlife protectionists.

Both men were uncompromising and came to that position after learning some lessons the hard way. For Brower it was acceding to the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam to protect Dinosaur National Monument. For Hornaday, it was working with sportsmen and even gun manufacturers. In both instances, Brower and Hornaday felt  betrayed and became unyielding in their pursuit of what they considered the pure and just cause. 

Both men were workaholics. Brower to the extent, according to Wyss, that he damaged his marriage and even relationship to his children. While Hornaday’s marriage and relation with his daughter remained solid as bedrock, he worked long days as director of the Bronx Zoo followed by long nights and weekends writing. He wrote, as he mentioned in several letters over the years, until he could no longer keep his eyes open.

Both men were builders. Brower took a small California mountaineering club and turned it into an influential national environmental organization. Hornaday built the largest zoo in the world from scratch and made it the international standard in animal conservation and education.

The last similarity that I wish to bring up is that both Brower and Hornaday relentlessly battled federal governmental agencies. For Brower, it was the Bureau of Reclamation. For Hornaday, it was the Bureau of Biological Survey, forerunner to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Both were scathing in denouncing these agencies, their motives, their use of science, and their unhealthy connections to business interests. 

  

I am not sure what all this means. Perhaps, the most that can be teased out of this is that agents of change can be prickly, principled, and unyielding characters unwilling to accept things as they are when they see things as they should be.