"Keep the Bowels open, at all hazards" and more advice on fighting the Spanish-American War in 1898

Unlike most Americans in 1898, forty-three year old zoologist, author, taxidermist, conservationist, and hunter, William T. Hornaday had spent considerable time in the tropics "collecting" wildlife specimens for Henry A. Ward's Natural History Establishment in Rochester, New York. Ward sold the skins, bones, and sundry other materials collected by Hornaday and dozens of other young men to the nation's growing number of natural history museums. Honraday traveled and hunted extensively in Florida, Cuba, several smaller Caribbean islands, Venezuela, India, Malaysia, and Borneo between 1874 and 1879. Two Years in  the Jungle, a memoir of his experiences in Asia, was published in 1886. 

Like a patriotic American who believed his country was doing the correct thing in declaring war on Spain, Hornaday offered advice for better living in tropical conditions based on his own experiences. In one regard, though, he was either sugarcoating his own memory or being downright disingenuous in stating that his most debilitating experience had been "slight attacks of jungle fever" in India. In fact, as his letters from the times show, he suffered several crippling attacks. In one such instance, he survived thanks to the ministrations of a good samaritan. He offered his advice for the Cuba campaign in the pages of the New York Sun newspaper on May 22, 1898 (https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1898-05-22/ed-1/seq-4/).

Here are his suggestions: 

1. Sleep in a hammock. "This is for the  very simple reason that the malarious exhalations from the earth,  from the stagnant water and decaying vegetation, are densest and most dangerous at the surface of the ground." Hammocks had the added advantage of being handy for other purposes (i.e. carrying wounded), light, and easy to carry. 

2. Use a mosquito shirt. By this he meant more of what we might think of as a screen that would create a tent over the hammock to keep mosquitos out during sleep.  

3. Don't drink any water without boiling it first. 

4. Wear a ventilated hat that has little or no direct contact with the head, such as a pith or cork helmet. He particularly warned against the wearing of felt or straw hats because they were too warm and invited heatstroke. One can see in images of the famous Rough Riders and other units that this advice was ignored. 

5. Never rest or sleep in wet clothes. Therefore, always have a dry outfit wrapped in the rubber blanket in your pack to protect against dampness.  He doesn't mention much else about clothing, i.e. no comments about wearing heavy wool uniforms during summer in a tropical environment. Nor does he state outright that a rubber blanket is a necessity.

6. Be temperate in habits. Don't eat too much meat. Don't eat any unripe fruits. Drinking alcohol sparingly.  This is pretty standard thinking among the American middle class of the day. Bananas are the one food he recommended as being nutritious and tasty. I'm sure he didn't foresee the gross cans of meat that made soldiers violently ill.  

7. You got it, keep the bowels open. And he recommended some sort of flannel bandage around the midsection for diarrhea. Sounds kinda like a diaper.

8. Lastly, don't overdo the quinine. His experience is that it was an effectiveness wore off with use. So, save it for when you really need it.

Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts

Instead of a more traditional review of Beloved Beasts, I am going to provide my three biggest takeaways from this book. I come to Beloved Beasts as an environmental historian. Although familiar with the full range of the subject, most of my research and expertise (such as it is) is in the first part of the book, the years prior to World War II, especially the conservation movement of the Progressive Era. Before proceeding, I do want to clarify that Beloved Beasts is not a book written for specialists in the field. It is indeed an excellent introduction for anyone who is deeply concerned about the status of wildlife in the world today and wants to know how we got here and what has been done to protect animals over the prior century. In addition to historical research, Michelle Nijhuis includes some of her own original reporting and experiences. This gives the book a very personal feel. 

First takeaway is that between 2002 and 2019 1800 people “were murdered in the course of defending land, water, plants, and animals from poaching and other human insults (p. 7).” That is a staggering number, of course. As a specialist in the conservation movement of the Progressive Era, Guy Bradley’s name and story is very familiar to me. Bradley was an agent hired by the National Association of Audubon Societies to protect herons and egrets in the Everglades because Florida did not enforce laws against hunting. He was murdered in 1905 by poachers and became a martyr to the cause of wildlife protection. His death clearly demonstrated the inherent violence of market hunters who slaughtered wildlife for the plumage trade. Every conservationist of the day knew his name and story. It saddens me that there is no such recognition for the 1800 people who were killed since 2002. 

 

Second takeaway is that over 18,000 new species are classified every year. For whatever reason, it amazes me that we are discovering so many new species every year. Yet, with deforestation, especially rainforests, and destruction to other ecosystems, we are killing even more off without even identifying them. Again, like Bradley, it’s a matter of recognition. Everyone in the early twentieth century could name the recently extinct species: auk, Carolina parakeets, dodo, passenger pigeon, etc. They became a rallying cry, like “Remember the Maine” that activists used to remind the public of what extinction meant. It helped that they were somewhat charismatic wildlife, compared to smaller snails, frogs, insects, and other less charming species that make up the bulk of more recent extinct species. Even so, we cannot memorialize them if we did not know they ever existed. I know that this is a very human-centric perspective, but it not knowing shrouds the impact of our actions and limits our capacity to convince others who do not see this these invisible extinctions as an ecological or even moral problem.  

 

Third takeaway is that mistakes were made. This is not a story of a logical unfolding of a single, unified movement. Bad things were done for what seemed like good reasons, good outcomes emerged from poor reasons, there were numerous policy reversals, experts and scientists fought amongst themselves, and other inconsistences. What seemed right in 1910 was not true in 1930, let alone in 2010. When Rosalie Edge, for example, confronted the Audubon Society in the 1930s, she was literally taking on the established consensus view of wildlife protection. Her effort to expand protection to hawks, eagles, and other predatory birds was less a simple policy change than a total paradigm shift. I was familiar with Edge, but Nijhuis intrigued me with the story of how Elinor Ostrom took on conventional wisdom, especially Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” thesis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Not all “new” approaches are so new. Much as Guy Bradley was a former poacher hired to catch market hunters, a century later the same logic is being deployed to protect elephants and other targeted species in Africa. In Namibia former poachers are hired to protect rhinoceroses and other endangered species. While this is producing some tangible results, the necessary relationship and trust building is very time consuming when there is so little to spare.

The Revolutions of 1848

 I have long wanted to read about the revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848. As an undergrad at St. John’s University, I took a nineteenth century European history course with the great Frank Coppa. Coppa was an expert on Italian unification and the papacy. He certainly knew his stuff. But as this topic hovered on the periphery of my reading intentions, it kept getting knocked farther away by more pressing topics and projects. Finally, in 2021 I got my hands on Mike Rapport’s 1848: Year of the Revolution. Rapport examines each of the affected countries, capturing their similarities and variations, and tying them together for the continental perspective. Not all of Europe was affected. The revolutions bypassed Ireland, Great Britain, Scandinavia, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and the Iberian Peninsula. The only thing that has come as close to such a continental-wide revolution was the collapse of communism in 1989. 

Three big takeaways stand out for me as an historian of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. First, the revolutions were not solely political affairs of democrats and liberals challenging the ancient regimes. Of course, there was plenty of that, but the liberal elements were too deeply fractured in their approaches to constitutions, voting, nationalism, the role of the monarchy, the structure of society, etc. Radical urban workers, middle class liberals, reactionary aristocrats, and conservative peasants battled one another in this tumultuous year. Their divisive outlooks, suspicions, understandings, and proposed solutions sprung from the enormous social and economic changes upheavals that shook Europe. Enter the social question. Industrialization, urbanization, migration, factories replacing crafts, the deskilling of labor, class conflicts, radicalism -- all the things associated with Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the United States – played a significant role in both making 1848 happen, while, at the same time, undermining its chance of success. 

 

Second, as Rapport argues, 1848 shaped Europe and this did not change until the end of World War I. The Europe of 1914 with its long-simmering problems can trace its roots to 1848. Just to take one very important example, the question of nationalities and self-determination grows out of the conflicts of 1848. The year of revolution was the seedbed of German, Italian, and Romanian unification drives that achieved their goals in the following decades. Although less successful in other areas, 1848 nonetheless opened the nationality question among Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Slavs, and some others, challenging the multi-ethnic Austrian Empire. I think I better understand the Europe of 1914 thanks to this book.  

 

Finally, in addition to the internal divisions, a concerted and powerful conservative counterattack doomed the political revolutions. While 1848 produced some constitutional changes, reactionary monarchs squashed others, crushed insurrections, and reneged on promises of greater reform that they had made at the height of the revolution. Ultra conservative Franz Josef replaced the more wishy-washy and fearful Ferdinand II on the Hapsburg throne and asked Tsar Nicholas I to help defeat the Hungarian independence movement. After making some concessions to revolutionary movements, Prussian King William IV adopted a hardline approach. In France, where the revolutions started, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor’s nephew, rose to power. He mixed a conservative authoritarianism with a populist social and economic message.  Although this book was published in 2008 the rise of the man who would later become Napoleon III seems a frightening precursor to more recent years (as well as the 1930s).