Understanding the locust’s biology also allowed the commission to narrow the time and space into which management practices could be most effectively concentrated. The widely held belief that females could lay only a single pod of eggs had led to understandable confusion as to how so many locusts could hatch from the fields after a swarm had passed through. By proving that females could lay more than a single pod of eggs—thereby potentially increasing the locust population 100-fold from one generation to the next—Riley was able to account for the startling reproductive capacity of the locust. Moreover, knowing when and where eggs were laid, what time of year hatching commenced in various locales, and the distances that the nymphs moved before fledging set the stage for a scientific approach to control.
The commission understood that although the most spectacular phase of the locust was the swarms of adults, the creature was virtually unassailable at this time. No amount of frantic beating, or acrid smoke could avert a descending swarm. The key lay in the locust’s least conspicuous and most vulnerable life stage—the egg. The entomologists knew that the sedentary eggs could be subjected to systematic assaults for months on end. Riley conducted extensive and elaborate experiments on how moisture, temperature, and soil properties could reduce the survival of eggs. Although these laboratory studies were often flawed in their design, Riley made up for his lack of formal scientific training through keen observations in the field. These real-world assessments were sufficient to demonstrate that plowing, harrowing, and flooding the locust’s egg beds were not simply ways of flailing at the egg beds and giving farmers a sense of “having done something” but were the ecological key to quashing an outbreak. Riley was also a staunch supporter of the bounty system for eggs, arguing from his research that for every bushel of eggs that was destroyed, 100 acres of crops could be saved. The widespread adoption of these ovicidal tactics and bounties can be largely attributed to the commission’s work.
The commission advocated the widespread use of ditches to control the nymphs before they could become swarming adults. Understanding the labor involved, the entomologists studied the efficacy of various configurations and developed what became the standard set of dimensions for a ditch that would minimize the amount of digging while maximizing the rate of trapping. Even so, the commission realized that the scale of trenching was beyond the capacity of many frontier communities. Alluding to the use of the army against locusts in Algeria and France, Riley pressed hard for the use of the military in providing labor to suppress the locusts. At the 1875 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Detroit, Riley laid out his case for using the army to “carry the war into Africa”—that is, to take the battle into the locust’s native land in the Rocky Mountains. Although federal troops were never mobilized, the commission’s position supported state legislation allowing conscription for “locust armies.”
The entomologists were rather less enthusiastic about various contraptions for controlling locusts, as their efficacy and expense were rarely justified. The commission’s chief, however, managed to parlay the farmers’ entrepreneurial fervor into a bit of notoriety for himself. The “Riley Locust-Catcher” became perhaps the best known of the machines, courtesy of a rave review in an early issue of Scientific American: “Professor Riley, of the Entomological Commission, perfected last summer a grasshopper machine, which seems to be just the thing.” It was, in fact, a hybrid of components drawn from other devices. He had the further savvy not to patent his machine—assuming that it was sufficiently novel to warrant this protection. Such legal niceties were marginally enforceable and economically worthless on the frontier. Moreover, Riley could gain far more in terms of status and public acclaim by generously offering his device to the besieged farmers, and not exercising his putative right to patent “unless it should be found necessary to prevent others from doing so.”
The commission enthusiastically endorsed the use of biological control for suppressing the locust. They clearly understood that the greatest natural mortality was through the action of various unheralded parasites—mites, flies, and beetles—that ravaged the locusts. Although they could not see many opportunities for enhancing or augmenting these tiny allies, their studies of the locust’s ecology laid the foundation for our modern methods of biological control that emphasize the use of host-specific parasites and pathogens. Without the technical means of rearing and releasing biological control agents, the commission turned to the conservation of locust predators. In this context, their reports provided a bully pulpit for Aughey’s earlier work and the political leverage to impel the passage of legislation protecting native birds. Much to his credit, Riley shied away from calls to intentionally spread exotic species, such as the English sparrow. He maintained that this bird was unlikely to consume many locusts and that if it could thrive in the locust’s range, then it would spread there on its own. As an ecologist, Riley seemed to intuit the risks of invasive, nonnative species to natural and agricultural landscapes, a prescience that unfortunately has not been widely shared by economic entomologists even into recent times.
Perhaps the entomologists’ most lasting legacy was their advocacy of a strategically diversified agriculture. They realized that although the locust was omnivorous, not all plants were equally susceptible. There was no equivalent of the American grape rootstock’s resistance to phylloxera, but Riley knew that evolutionary pressures would surely have caused some plants to be more tolerant of the locust than others. The commission catalogued reports of damage from dozens of farmers to piece together a set of recommendations for which crops to plant. Mixed plantings of peas, beans, sorghum, broom corn, tomatoes, and sweet potatoes were recommended as viable alternatives to other far more susceptible vegetables and cereals. If a farmer insisted on planting wheat, then the entomologists advised using one of the bearded varieties that seemed more resistant. The commission even suggested planting a strip of timothy—one of the locust’s most favored foods—around fields of corn or wheat; the grass served as a trap crop that could be treated with a poison once the locusts were concentrated in the strip. Riley also encouraged a program of tree planting across the Midwest, as he believed that the natural barrier of forested lands kept the locusts from moving beyond the Mississippi and that this ecological Maginot Line could be extended to the west. Finally, the possibility of large-scale, strategically located fallows was seriously considered as a means of starving the hatchlings. However, the imposition of such crop-free zones never materialized as no government had the courage to order farmers not to plant after they’d already been decimated by the swarms.
By far, the strangest approach to locust management was Riley’s recommendation to simply eat the insects. Nearly five pages of the commission’s first report were devoted to an argument for consuming locusts. Although Packard cracked the door to entomophagy in suggesting in his previous writings that humans had delighted in consuming other arthropods (lobster, crab, and shrimp all being considered delicacies), Riley shoved the door open in enthusiastically advocating the culinary uses of locusts. Although his early experiments were not terribly encouraging, he stuck with it:I found the chitinous covering and the corneous parts—especially the spines of the tibia—dry and chippy, and somewhat irritating to the throat. This objection would not apply, with the same force, to the mature individuals, especially of the larger species, where the heads, legs, and wings are carefully separated before cooking. In fact, some of the mature insects prepared in this way, then boiled and afterward stewed with a few vegetables, and a little butter, pepper, salt and vinegar, made an excellent fricassee.
Not only did he prepare them himself, but he also enticed chefs to explore the possibilities: “I sent a bushel of the scalded insects to Mr. John Bonnet, one of the oldest and best known caterers in Saint Louis. Master of the mysteries of the cuisine, he made a soup which was really delicious, and was so pronounced by dozens of prominent Saint Louisians who tried it.” To affirm that the palatability of locusts w
as not the consequence of an uncultured palate, Riley took fried specimens to France and England, where “they were tasted and reported better than expected.” Faint praise, perhaps, but to Riley a ringing endorsement.
As odd as it was to suggest that locusts should be converted into delicacies, the notion did not seem to undermine Riley’s credibility. He took pains to explain that this venture was neither fancy nor folly, but a pragmatic approach to human suffering. Acknowledging that his efforts to test the locust for edibility and to develop simple recipes would provoke “ridicule and mirth, or even disgust,” Riley pushed ahead, contending, “Yet I was governed by weightier reasons than mere curiosity; for many a family in Kansas and Nebraska was in 1874 brought to the brink of the grave by sheer lack of food, while the St. Louis papers reported cases of actual death from starvation in some sections of Missouri, where the insects abounded and ate up every green thing in the spring of 1875.” Knowing the cultural obstacles to eating locusts, Riley still maintained that if his analyses allowed even a few people to avoid suffering and starvation, then “I shall not have written in vain.”
Unfortunately (at least for those hoping to demonstrate the power of science as a means of altering the course of nature on a continental scale) the Rocky Mountain locust plague began to subside a year after the commission started its work. Given Riley’s enormous capacity for self-promotion and the extraordinary contributions that the commission had made to developing scientifically sound management methods, the politicians and the public were delighted to attribute the locust’s demise to the work of the entomologists. Riley might have fiercely rebutted the logical fallacy that attributed droughts to prairie fires, but he wasn’t about to suggest that there was any error in linking the existence of his commission and the adoption of their methods to the precipitous decline in the locust’s populations. To be fair, short-term regional applications of the commission’s recommended methods had proven enormously effective and remarkably efficient, and had the outbreak persisted it may well have been defeated by the integrated tactics the entomologists recommended.
Perhaps most important, even these preliminary results of scientific pest management were widely seen as being entirely sufficient to establish the efficacy of applied research in solving grave national problems. The country’s grand experiment in publicly funded science was declared a rip-roaring success. And so, with the insects in retreat and his reputation soaring, Riley made his move.
Riley had laid the foundation for a power grab in Washington in his reports as the Missouri state entomologist and echoed these sentiments in his role as chief of the commission. Using a carrot-and-stick approach to political lobbying, Riley first stroked the egos of any politician who had the foresight to appreciate the coming revolution in entomology:There yet are, and doubtless ever will be, those who—dwelling in cities, and familiar only with such lectularious insects as cause them bodily inconvenience—have little appreciation of Agriculture or Entomology in its connection with it; and consider the study of “bugs,” as they contemptibly call everything that creeps, a fit subject for ridicule. . . . Fortunately, such persons are becoming fewer and fewer, and the following pages bear witness to the fact that not only in several States in our Union, but in several countries of the “Old World”—in monarchies, empires and republics alike—the authorities have manifested a remarkable appreciation of economic Entomology.
With governments around the world seeing the light, surely the U.S. Congress—or at least its wisest members—would understand the incredible value of finally winning the war against one of humanity’s most ancient and formidable enemies. But, a sympathetic senator or representative might argue, “Don’t we already have a Department of Agriculture and isn’t this agency taking the lead in ensuring that modern practices are being developed?” Riley anticipated such a rejoinder and was loaded for bear:We have, it is true, a Department of Agriculture which, if under intelligent and scientific control, might employ the large sums it now fritters away in the gratuitous distribution of seeds, to better advantage; but the people have lost all hope of getting much good out of that institution as at present organized, or so long as the character of its head and management depends on political whim or fancy.
When Townsend Glover, the USDA’s inept entomological head, fell ill in 1878, Riley was poised for ascendancy. In June, he was appointed chief entomologist to the USDA, a position that would allow him to alter the course of economic entomology. His fellow entomologists had rather less ambitious goals. With the locusts in recession and the commission’s work on the crisis dwindling, the other two entomologists pursued paths as divergent as their personalities.
Packard was appointed professor of zoology at Brown University, where he continued a long and distinguished academic career. He was one of the first entomologists to realize that there were more orders of insects than those described by Linnaeus a century earlier, and Packard substantially improved the taxonomy of insects. He expanded his research to include studies of a wide range of other invertebrates, describing fifty new genera and nearly 600 new species of insects, spiders, crustaceans, and mollusks throughout his career. This immense body of work was recognized by his being named to the National Academy of Sciences. In his later years, he turned his attention to more philosophical and theoretical aspects of zoology. Despite the growing acceptance of Darwin’s concepts, Packard remained loyal to the Lamarckian theory of evolution. Following a visit to France, Packard wrote an authoritative biography of Lamarck, a tribute to his lifelong fascination with this French naturalist. This was to be his last substantive work, as he fell ill and died at the age of sixty-six.
Thomas returned to his faculty position in natural history at Southern Normal University and his work as state entomologist. But as he was a classical nineteenth-century natural scientist, Thomas’s interests were eclectic and he was increasingly fascinated by anthropology. And so, at the age of fifty-seven, he resigned from his state duties to join the Smithsonian Institution. Working with the Bureau of Ethnology he became a renowned authority on archaeology and an expert on Mayan inscriptions, the mound builders in the Mississippi Valley and Gulf states, and the Cherokee and Shawnee people. Having served as the president of the Bureau of American Ethnology and published such seminal books as Introduction to the Study of North American Archaeology, Thomas is now remembered more for his anthropological than for his entomological studies. He died at the age of eighty-five, having enjoyed a rich and varied life practicing law, ministry, and science.
After the triumvirate disbanded, one of Riley’s first acts revealed the compassionate side of this otherwise megalomaniacal figure. Although Riley seemed to have nothing but contempt for his predecessor, he took pains to ensure that Glover was fairly compensated by the House Committee for Agriculture for the meticulously rendered copper plates that he had produced on his own. One might posit that Riley’s recent marriage had soothed his restless spirit. Or perhaps the serene setting of his new workplace calmed his nerves. The lily pond just inside the entrance to the grounds, rows of elegant ginkgoes bordering the main drive, and the surrounding park of rolling lawns punctuated with groves of trees in neat, botanical groupings should have put him at ease. But Riley had the passionate heart of an artist to go along with the rational mind of a scientist, and it was not long before he was once again mired in controversy.
Riley’s assistant and the man who would one day succeed him, Leland O. Howard, described his chief as “a restless, ambitious man, a great schemer, and striving constantly to make his work appear more important.” As was the normal practice of the time, Riley’s name appeared as the author of many bulletins and reports that were entirely written by his assistants. As Howard noted, “This was considered quite ethical, in fact, the proper thing to do. The assistants accepted the situation, not because it was right, but because there was nothing they could do about it.” Howard was close enough to Riley to infer that some of his irascibility might be physiological, as well as psyc
hological. While living in Washington, Riley often suffered from headaches and insomnia. After he discovered that he could sleep in a barber’s chair better than a bed, on restless nights he’d go to his barber and pay by the hour to sleep. For all of his pragmatism in the field of entomology, Riley apparently never thought of simply putting such a chair in his house.
Outside of work—a world of intense striving and fierce competition, largely of his own creation—Riley was a different man. He was a loving and tender father to seven children, although his role was limited by poor health and excessive work. In public he could be absolutely charming, “discussing almost any topic with versatility and good humor.” In Washington social circles, he was usually a genial guest, full of grace and wit. But even in polite society Riley could be cantankerous when matters of science became even peripherally involved. When he was invited to a seance, a popular diversion in the late 1800s, Riley nearly put an end to the evening by irritably voicing his disbelief in the proceedings. His host warned that such acrimonious skepticism could hinder the appearance of the sensitive spirit, but Riley was undeterred in his expostulation about the evening as senseless tripe.
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