The U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor quickly submitted a report confirming that many of the seals had indeed been skinned alive. Aleuts who lived on the island were unbiased eyewitnesses. Even more disturbing were the photographs taken of seals half-skinned, hobbling about maimed and apparently bleating in pain. Many bigots in California used the incident as a pretext for sweeping condemnations of the Japanese character. Roosevelt’s own reaction was beyond words. Poaching always set him off like a bomb, and the poaching in this case made him apoplectic. Realizing that the Aleutian Islands were the remotest land in North America, and that policing the 1,200-mile archipelago was an impossible task, Roosevelt nevertheless was proud of the U.S. Navy for attacking these and other raiders. Tokyo wanted the Roosevelt administration to try the sailors for the murder of the five Japanese men. Japanese lawyers, as noted above, argued that according to the Alaskan criminal code, seal poaching was not a felony but a misdemeanor, and that committing murder to stop a misdemeanor was not justifiable in a republic based on democratic principles.
Determined to flummox Roosevelt, the bitter Japanese government developed a legal argument and recommended punitive measures. But Roosevelt was unbending with regard to seal or bird rookeries. Instead of court-martialing the sailors, he congratulated them for being outstanding watchdogs for Alaska’s priceless seal herds. However, not wanting to go to war with Japan over this incident, he told Secretary of the Navy Charles J. Bonaparte to remove all U.S. ships from Asian waters. The international incident should be settled by diplomats, not battleships. With tension so high on both sides, Roosevelt privately feared an international incident, even while publicly expressing militaristic bravado.
Realizing that the United States was holding a weak hand, the State Department had Assistant Solicitor William C. Dennis draft a memorandum reflecting Roosevelt’s views on the imbroglio; it was submitted on September 10, 1907. “The circumstances of a pelagic seal raid in a wild country like Alaska, carried on by armed raiders and accompanied by a brutal and cruel slaughter of the seal herd, put a severe strain on the common-law doctrine defining the rights of misdemeanants,” Dennis wrote. “It has not been so long since Kipling could say ‘There is never a law of God or man runs north of Fifty-three,’ and it may well be that the methods of those heroic days are still sometimes morally justifiable irrespective of the provisions of the penal code.” 45
Tokyo was furious over Dennis’s memorandum. It had about as much legal validity as the hanging of a horse thief in The Virginian. Did Roosevelt really think that Japan would accept Kipling as a defense? Dennis was unable to explain convincingly that the president loved seals and that Roosevelt had found the butchering of an Alaskan herd worthy of vigilante action. Worried that the incident might escalate to war, Secretary of State Elihu Root wisely stepped into the fray. The best strategy was to cool down temperatures on both sides. Root, working closely with the Department of the Navy, came up with a different defense of American sailors to present to Ambassador Baron Kogoro Takahira: the poachers were “burglars” and burglary was a felony under Alaskan law. If this premise was accepted by Tokyo, then the killing of the five Japanese during their commission of a crime was justifiable. Wasn’t it? Reluctantly, in May 1908, the Japanese government accepted this argument, and the diplomatic crisis ended.
As a conservationist Roosevelt had prided himself on his stewardship of the whole land. This included Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. With his literary imagination Roosevelt could hear the waters slapping against ancestral rocks—the sound seemed to travel all the way from the Bering Sea to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.. He could imagine the baby seals Kipling had written about in The Jungle Book, the Aleuts killing only what they would eat, and the Japanese poachers believing they could ignore international boundaries. Growing up in Manhattan after the Civil War, T.R. had enriched his naturalist studies by acquiring a seal skull. Now, as president, he had threatened to send battleships to preserve these friendly mammals’ Alaskan rookeries.
VII
There was great joy in preservationist circles on June 29, 1906, when President Roosevelt signed Mesa Verde National Park into existence. Credit for the park should probably have gone to the skilled ancestral Pueblo masons who had built the cliff dwellings 700 to 1,600 years earlier. But Roosevelt instead lavished praise on Congressman John F. Lacey, Edgar Lee Hewett, John Wetherill, and others. The motto for saving these enchanting cliff dwellings—rock villages in protected alcoves of the southwestern Colorado canyon walls—was “leaving the past in place.” Once the Pueblo tribes of Mesa Verde had migrated south to the Rio Grande region in 1300, the Ute tried to live in the Mesa Verde (Spanish for “green table”) cliffs. Much as the Comanche helped bring the buffalo back to Oklahoma, the Ute played a crucial role in protecting the cliff dwellings from pillagers over the decades. From the hundreds of dwellings of Mesa Verde that survived erosion and human defacement, archaeologists in 1906 had saved a hugely important chapter in the saga of prehistoric America.46
When Roosevelt created Mesa Verde National Park, it contained 52,073 acres, all rising high above the surrounding mesa. There were more than 4,000 deserted dwellings for archaeologists like Hewett and novices like the Wetherills to analyze now in an appropriate way. Two women—Virginia Donaghe McClurg and Lucy Peabody—had led the successful crusade to preserve these ruins. McClurg was a New Yorker who had moved to Colorado in 1879 to teach. Intrigued by the mysteries of Mesa Verde, she wrote a series of preservationist stories for the Review of Reviews, Cosmopolitan, and Century Magazine. Her partner in championing Mesa Verde—Lucy Peabody—came from Cincinnati. For a while Peabody worked as a secretarial assistant at the Bureau of American Ethnology, where she advocated saving the ruins in the Four Corners area. When she married a major in the U.S. Army, she moved to Denver, where her interest in Mesa Verde’s cliff dwellings grew.
Both McClurg and Peabody were devoted Roosevelt Republicans in 1906—i.e., progressives. They saw in Roosevelt the best chance for preserving Mesa Verde from speculators. Influenced by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Chautauqua movement, and Susan B. Anthony, they became a bulwark against silver mining around Durango, Colorado. At that time, Europeans were offering money for ancient relics found around the Mesa Verde excavation site. A recession had developed, and pot hunting became profitable for poor Coloradan farmers and for transients. In 1891 twenty-three year old Nils Otto Gustaf Nordenskiöld, of the Academy of Sciences, collected more than 600 items for Sweden from Mesa Verde. (Today they’re in a museum in Helsinki and should be returned to the United States at once.) In 1893 Nordenskiöld—whose uncle was a famous Arctic explorer—published a heavily illustrated book, The Cliff Dwellings of Mesa Verde. Archaeologists from all over the world now wanted to visit Colorado. “Nordenskiöld’s expedition and the loss of a large and valuable collection aroused both admiration and deep resentment among American archeologists,” historian Char Miller writes, “and provided strong arguments in Congress for protective legislation.”47 Roosevelt felt that Nordenskiöld had looted American property. Wasn’t there any law to stop foreign raiders from stealing U.S. antiquities?
When Roosevelt became president in 1901, the answer to his question was still no. Yet, with Lacey working on the legislative angles (and the activists in Santa Fe who gravitated around Edgar Lee Hewett receiving attention from the press), a federal strategy was incrementally being put in place for the Pajarito Plateau and Mesa Verde. Using the power of the pen, McClurg and Peabody initiated a grassroots progressive movement in Colorado to protect Mesa Verde. Women in Colorado had won the vote in 1893 (they were among the first in America to do so), and these suffragists now made Mesa Verde their cause. They tried to persuade the Ute to cede Mesa Verde to the federal government. They formed a women’s association to police the cliff dwellings and protect the site from vandals. With the help of John Wetherill, “No Trespassing” signs were posted—so many, in fact, that they looked frightening. The women also enlisted Hewett to
argue the archaeological case in Congress. “These are unquestionably the greatest prehistoric monuments within the limits of the United States,” Hewett said. “Aside from their great historic and scientific value they would be of more general interest to the public.” A visibly upset Hewett claimed that “irresponsible damage” was being done at Mesa Verde and that the “deterioration progresses very rapidly.”48
From 1901 to 1903, during the Fifty-Seventh Congress, two bills had been introduced in the House of Representatives to establish a national park at Mesa Verde—both died. Congress did authorize the Department of the Interior to negotiate with the Ute in the hope that they would relinquish the ancient cliff dwellings. But that was a minor issue to Coloradans anxious to save Mesa Verde. With Roosevelt urging Lacey, Hewett, Wetherill, McClurg, and Peabody to stay the course, two bills were introduced in the Fifty-Eighth Congress for a “Colorado Cliff Dwellings National Park.” These also failed. It had become clear to Lacey that getting a sweeping act passed to save the southwestern antiquities than would be easier fighting for each ruin separately. So in the late spring of 1906 it was a happy turn of events when the Antiquities Act of June 8 passed and was soon followed by the creation of Mesa Verde National Park.
Roosevelt wasn’t passive about his new national park, the first in Colorado. Working closely with the Smithsonian Institution, the Department of the Interior began excavating and repairing the Anasazi sites. Jesse Walter Fewkes of the Smithsonian, for example, had crumbling walls quickly stabilized. Proper roads were soon constructed so that visitors could enjoy the ruins. Cliff dwellings in the park, such as Long House, Mug House, and Step House, were popularized in periodicals including Harper’s and National Geographic. Any vandals who dared touch the ruins would be fined $1,000. The “mothers of Mesa Verde”—McClurg and Peabody—had prevailed.49
VIII
That June the Roosevelt administration was on an upswing regarding the preservation of southwestern prehistoric ruins and cliff dwellings: the Antiquities Act and Mesa Verde were steps forward for the progressive movement. However, the Bronx Zoo took a leap backward. It is true that the New York Zoological Society was running the most amazing endangered species program in the world. As Roosevelt had envisioned it in 1895, Charles Darwin had a living memorial in the Bronx. Two Colorado black bears—Teddy B and Teddy G—had been donated to the zoo that spring by an admirer of the president.50 They were advertised as “teddy bears,” and the city’s schoolchildren flocked to the zoo as if P. T. Barnum’s circus elephants were in town. The rambunctious bear cubs were adorable, with jolly faces and a little white around their muzzles. Every five or ten minutes the cubs, lacking their mother’s discipline, tumbled and rolled in a playful wrestling match as crowds gathered around to ooh and aah. Also, British East Africa—particularly the grasslands of Kenya and Uganda—tugged at Roosevelt’s mind and he had requested that the New York Zoological Society purchase a baby rhinoceros for $5,000. The board complied. The rhino, only five or six years old and weighing 250 to 300 pounds, was an immediate star attraction at the zoo. And there was another baby star as well: a buffalo calf was born in captivity that June. Hornaday had now successfully raised two generations of calves since the founding of the zoo.51
But unfortunately, the New York Zoological Society’s success in showcasing small animals led Hornaday to make a fatal error in judgment. At the Saint Louis World’s Fair in 1904 Hornaday had been fascinated by a Congolese pygmy, Ota Benga, who was put on public display in an ethnological exhibit called the University of Man. The backstory here is essential. An eccentric missionary and anthropologist, Samuel Phillips Verner, had been hunting for specimens in the Belgian Congo when he stumbled on Ota Benga in a cage. According to Verner, a cannibalistic tribe planned to eat the pygmy. What a find! Immediately, Verner had an idea for a human rights gesture. Why not put the pygmy on display in Saint Louis as an example of The Descent of Man? From shrew to spider monkey to chimpanzee to baboon to gorilla to pygmy—the display would be all the rage at the fair. So Verner purchased Benga, thereby, in his own mind, saving him from the boiling pot. Before long Benga found himself in Saint Louis. At the University of Man’s display of aboriginals, the “representatives” included Hottentots, Zulus, Eskimos, Filipinos, and Geronimo in the flesh. All the displays included proper species classifications on informative plaques, on the assumption that these would present Darwinian theory in a more visually interesting way and help schoolchildren better understand it. Benga quickly learned to ham it up for coins, dancing and basket weaving like the popular image of a bushman.
Hornaday was taken in by this racist hullabaloo. After seeing Ota Benga in Saint Louis he negotiated to have the pygmy—who had meanwhile been brought back to Africa—delivered to the Bronx Zoo for public display. At first Benga was startled by the diverse animals at the zoo. Being from the Congo had hardly prepared Benga for, say, the huge pythons that hung out of crooked tree limbs and were fed live rats. New Yorkers cheered the new acquisition, which enhanced their civic pride. In the tradition of the Bronx Zoo’s educational outreach, Hornaday dutifully wrote an article on Ota Benga for the October 1906 edition of the Zoological Society Bulletin; it was called “African Pygmy” and was positioned right before one called “The Collection of Lizards.”52
Reading that issue of the Bulletin is a frightening journey into the perils of Darwinism as applied to human beings. For all of his sophistication in husbandry Hornaday had a deplorable attraction to eugenics. So did Madison Grant, who had approved the Bronx Zoo’s abominable display. Hornaday—who was doubtlessly a better man than this ugly episode suggests—called Benga part of the “smallest racial division of the human genus and probably the lowest in cultural development.”53 Kept in a cage next to an orangutan named Dohong, who pedaled around on a tricycle, Benga was provided with straw and rope to weave. No monkey could do that! The pygmy had evolved! “He has much manual skill,” the article in the Bulletin noted, “and is quite expert in the making of hammocks and nets.” Sometimes Benga was encouraged to sleep with the chimpanzees for mutually beneficial socializing. To attract visitors, and hoping to build on the success of Teddy B and Teddy G, Hornaday advertised that something “New Under the Sun” in zookeeping had occurred at the Monkey House. It was as if the Bronx Zoo were trying to explain Mendel’s theories of heredity with regard to the trait of smallness versus largeness—using Benga as exhibit A. And the tourists did come in droves.
On September 8, opening day, a huge crowd gathered to see Hornaday’s prize exhibit. Expectations were high. And Benga, his teeth filed into arrowheads to add the allure of menace, didn’t disappoint the spectators. But the New York Times seemed appalled: “Bushman Shares a Cage with Bronx Park Apes.” To be fair to Hornaday, Benga had already become a Darwinian specimen at Saint Louis, where headlines such as “Pygmies Demand a Monkey Diet” and “Pygmy Dance Starts Panic in Fair Plaza” appeared. However, in New York the Times article of early September 1906 helped raise a public accusation of racism at the Bronx Zoo. The whole spectacle, which included white children laughing and taunting Benga in his cage, turned the “serious minded grave.” The Times questioned the morality of putting an African on public display in such a pseudoscientific way.
Likewise, African-American ministers in New York protested against putting a human being in a cage with a monkey. The Reverend Dr. R. S. MacArthur of Cavalry Baptist Church announced a coordinated “agitation” aimed at freeing Ota Benga. Reports of the whole affair were getting more and more sordid. “It is too bad,” MacArthur said, “that there is not some society like [the New York Society] for the Prevention of the Cruelty to Children.” MacArthur went so far as to say that Benga was a slave. “We send our missionaries to Africa to Christianize the people,” he remarked “and then we bring one here to brutalize him.” He also went directly after Hornaday, saying that “the person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as does the African.”54
In accordance with the Bronx Zoo
’s educational mission, an informational plaque was placed outside Ota Benga’s cage. It read:
Ota Benga was degraded by being put in a cage as a supposedly Darwinian exhibit at the Bronx Zoo. Benga was often made to pose with monkeys and had his teeth sharpened to look like a cannibal.
Ota Benga. (Courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History)
The African Pygmy, “Ota Benga.” Age 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight, 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa by Dr. Samuel P. Verner. Exhibited each afternoon during September.
That September the tabloids ran stories about Ota Benga—some sympathetic, others mocking. Facts came out: the Bronx Zoo hadn’t purchased the pygmy; he was on loan, so the charge of slavery was a guffaw. The New York Evening News condescendingly noted that while Benga was black, he wasn’t coal-black—he wasn’t actually on the bottom rung of the descent of man. That rung was occupied by more dark-skinned blacks. A spirited debate also ensued about whether Benga was a real pygmy or a dwarf or midget. There was great interest also in his sharply filed teeth, which led speculations about cannibalism. Schoolchildren visiting the zoo goaded Benga to rip at raw meat hurled at him by keepers. Benga’s nickname was “Bi,” and kids taunted him with it until he waved at them. One afternoon Benga, refusing to wear strange clothes, broke away from his keeper. When he was eventually apprehended he was brandishing a knife; quickly, the zookeepers disarmed him.55 “We are taking excellent care of the little fellow,” Hornaday said in the Bronx Zoo’s defense. “He has one of the best rooms in the primate house.”56
A few courageous Baptist ministers kept coming to the zoo to protest the incarceration of Ota Benga. Although there is no record of President Roosevelt’s getting involved in the controversy, Hornaday nevertheless started feeling pressure to reverse course. Charges of zoological quackery were starting to arise. “I do not wish to offend my colored brothers’ feelings or the feelings of any one for that matter,” Hornaday said. “I am giving the exhibitions purely as an ethnological exhibit. It is my duty to interest visitors to the park, and what I have done in exhibiting Benga is in pursuance of this. I am a believer in the Darwinian theory.” However, he insisted that Darwinism wasn’t the main reason for displaying the pygmy. Hornaday was a Nebraskan, raised on the frontier, and Ota was his counterpart to Geronimo in the Wild West show. After all, Buffalo Bill had received accolades for parading Apache performers around dusty fairgrounds. Why should Hornaday get pummeled in the press over a Congolese pygmy? Such criticism was selective and hypocritical. Exasperated, and tired of fierce criticism from newspapers and ministers, Hornaday went on to explain that Benga slept in the primate house because it was the most obvious and most “comfortable” place for him to bed down at the zoo.57 What was Hornaday supposed to do? Have him sleep with the zebras?
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