In 1878, two major studies by Strecker were published: his completed catalog, Lepidoptera: Rhopaloceres et Heteroceres, and his instructional guide and catalog, Butterflies and Moths of North America, books of much merit, each proof of his fighting spirit. Strecker used both for retribution, striking at issues of systematics and occasionally scoring points. He observed, for instance, that Edwards sometimes mixed up his genders and sometimes “imagined” differences in species when there were only “varieties” (Strecker did the same thing, of course). His most cutting charge was that Edwards overemphasized the early stages of the butterflies as a way to establish species identity, especially in the fritillaries (Edwards’s favorite butterfly group and his favorite method of establishing species). “Too much stress by far,” Strecker argued, “is laid on the circumstance of whether the larva differs or not from that of the ordinary form.75 Strecker pointed to Edwards’s descriptions of species to show how “worthless” modern taxonomy had become, reduced “always to same monotonous thing, the same stereotyped greyish under side, the same tedious ‘sinuous rows of spots,’ and the same everlasting this shaped or that shaped discal bar, spot, or mark.” He ridiculed Edwards’s contention that two forms of a genus of blue butterfly were separate species requiring separate names. “The most critical eye will fail to detect the slightest difference between them.” And, in a concluding exposé in Lepidoptera, he noted how Edwards had botched a description of another blue. “Since Mr. W. H. Edwards described this species, it very nearly had the misfortune of losing its birthright: the author having through accident, lost his types; and what was equally unfortunate, his memory.”76
As for Scudder, Strecker called his generic names the “Phantasies” of a “mad man” and claimed that “it would take volumes” to “recapitulate all” his “entomological vagaries.” “Language fails us, our hand refuses to go further—even the ink on our pen pales—must we record” the character of “this puerile affair?…Scudder’s lists, theories, etc, seem to be gotten up to show what amount of time and labor one human being is capable of wasting.” With Grote, Strecker was pitiless, mocking his “fancy” language and his understanding of moths as “so replete with errors and inaccuracies that to eliminate them all would leave it in much the same condition as the result of that arithmetical problem where ‘nothing from nothing and nothing remains.’ ” He berated Grote’s habit of hitching his own name to the end of every species he described, with hundreds of “groteiis” populating the literature, a “habit” that exposed Grote as someone who cared nothing for science or nature, only for himself, “ever ready and mad for any means that might bring his name into notice,” seeking to “exalt himself above others,” even “above all creation.”77
After visiting Strecker in 1878, young Theodore Mead returned home, certain, to the utter bemusement of William Henry Edwards, that Strecker had been misunderstood and “deserved credit for much that he has done.” Mead excused him “for much that is objectionable from his imperfect education.” In a letter to Joseph Lintner, William Henry observed that Mead “says that Strecker has not the slightest idea that he ever said anything that the most sensitive could find fault with.” Taking into account that Edwards here is paraphrasing in his own fashion, we might wonder who was hoodwinking whom.78 Edwards, at one point, had been angered not by Strecker’s supposed thievery but by what he considered an attempt by Strecker to upstage him in identifying a new species (by stealing the glory, in other words, a crime equal, in Edwards’s mind, to stealing the real thing). Was all this warfare a matter of social class? Did Edwards and Scudder et al. look down on Strecker because he had little formal education and worked with his hands as a stone carver?
Ironically, even some of Strecker’s supporters took Grote’s side, unaware of the cause of the feud between the two men. “Every candid reader will conclude that you and he have had an undecided quarrel,” John Morris wrote Strecker, “and that you are striking him from a distance. I regret this very much on your account” since “Grote is nothing to me.”79 Fred Tepper and Edward Graef, Grote’s boyhood collecting buddies but friends of Strecker’s too, denounced him for “degrading science” with “personal” politics. “I see with sorrow,” Graef wrote to Strecker in 1878, “that you do not avoid your gross personal remarks, but are getting worse then ever.… No matter how Grote may have wronged you, he always, as far as I could find out, treated you as a gentleman … which is certainly more than you have done to him.”80 In 1873, Joseph Lintner, the state entomologist of New York, wrote to Strecker, “You deserve enormous credit for what you are doing, under so many difficulties and impossible circumstances.” But, after reading Strecker’s catalog in 1877, he urged Strecker to drop the personal attacks. Strecker refused, and Lintner wrote back, “I am sorry to hear you say that you need have no care whom you offend. It is dangerous ground to take. If one outlaws the whole world, then the whole world may outlaw him, and I cannot conceive how any person can willingly place himself in that position.”81 George Hulst considered Strecker the most original of all American lepidopterists but, fearing that his angry outbursts would discredit everything he did as a naturalist, pleaded with him to think about “Science” before venting his anger in the press again. “Whatever our personal feelings, whatsoever our grievances, we should obey the voice of Science. We are nothing; the truths she utters are everything. As in your work, you well say, one new fact of science is worth a score of lives such as most we live, so apply your own sermons, and for science sake, put yourself on the altar.”82
Strecker, at first, tried to get out of Reading, Pennsylvania, hoping to find work as a naturalist, a change encouraged by a new friend, Arthur Fuller, an amateur moth specialist and well-known journalist. Fuller visited Reading in 1873 to see Strecker’s collection and returned home, certain of Strecker’s destiny—that is, if he’d only quit “cutting stone,” a dreary trade for so gifted a man. “A man of your talents must eventually find his place.”83 He praised Strecker at length in his newspaper, the Rural New Yorker, and led efforts to find him employment in leading museums. When Strecker inquired of Spencer Baird, at the Smithsonian, about possible openings there, Baird insisted that if he wanted a job he would have to stop collecting for himself, collect only for the government, and donate his existing collection to the Smithsonian. Strecker also believed he might get a position in Iowa, at the Davenport Museum of Natural Sciences, a flourishing institution founded in 1873 by a resourceful woman, Mary Putnam, under the directorship of her delicate, tubercular son, Duncan, an ardent butterfly man and a proponent of Strecker’s. Strecker did prepare insect descriptions for the museum journal and, in 1878, a few plates, and Duncan paid Strecker to paint butterfly tiles for the butterfly room. But the Putnams finally discouraged his job search.84 Meanwhile, Strecker found Spencer Baird’s demand that he trade in his collection for a job at the Smithsonian beneath contempt. Leaving Reading ceased to be an option.
One other escape route remained for Strecker: block out your enemies by immersing yourself in your butterflies. He had always preferred collecting, anyway, to purely scientific work. Now he was free—by default, as it were—to allow his Sehnsucht, his spiritual guide, to possess him fully. It did, and to such a degree that he would build the greatest monument to the spirit of collecting by an American naturalist, a magnificent treasury so packed with specimens, many of which were rare and endemic, as to transcend the confines of the man who assembled it. And here he found a partner in his pursuit, his new friend Berthold Neumoegen, whose heart beat for butterflies nearly as strongly as Strecker’s own and who didn’t care a fig what Strecker wrote about Grote, Edwards, or Scudder or they about him. Neumoegen had behind his collecting a great deal of capital (at least for the moment). Briefly blindsided by the business turmoil of the 1870s, he had managed to “establish” himself, late in the decade, “as a Broker” for “German millionaires,” he told Strecker.85 He bought many “exotics” from Otto Staudinger and Staudinger’s protégé Heinrich R
ibbe, who, in 1877, left Staudinger to create his own business in rare species, mailing many to Neumoegen.86 Neumoegen hired his own collectors and his own curator, Jacob Doll, a German immigrant with extensive knowledge of lepidoptera who had fought on the Union side in the Civil War and made his living as a baker in Brooklyn. In 1879, Neumoegen had a large butterfly room built in his house; Doll tended it twice a week.87 Neumoegen proposed making Strecker his “entomological secretary.” One can only ponder what Strecker thought of that.88
The two wrote to each other nearly daily, exchanged photographs of their children, vacationed and spent holidays together, and visited each other’s homes. Sometimes Strecker stayed for days at a time at Neumoegen’s place on East Forty-seventh Street, the men sharing butterfly lore for hours over bottles of wine.89 They bought insects together, from Staudinger and others, quibbling over who should get what and occasionally withholding information about particular specimens. “You never told me about the grand Saturnia you got from the South,” Neumoegen complained. “Is there a chance for me, poor fellow?”90 When Strecker seemed remote, or when both men were troubled by problems interfering with their common endeavor, Neumoegen struggled to get the butterfly exchanges flowing between them again. “Trouble should not estrange you from me,” he told Strecker, “as I have a full load of it myself. Come, come, be a little more lively and send something and give a signium vitae of your locked up self! I am always thinking of you, but you are—forgetting me.”91 Strecker enjoyed Neumoegen’s company immensely, because of his wealth and the comfort and the access to butterflies it promised but also because of his warmth, his accepting graciousness, and his easy drinking style. Neumoegen, for his part, hoped some of Strecker’s expertise on butterflies and moths would rub off on him, and he appreciated their common German heritage.
Still, from the start of their friendship, Strecker may have harbored resentment toward his friend, its depth and character perhaps beyond Neumoegen’s understanding. Strecker had begun, at unsustainable cost to himself, to shell out hundreds of dollars for “exotische Schmetterlinge” from Staudinger, but Neumoegen’s appetite for exotics pushed Strecker to find makeshift ways of matching his competitive friend, even in the face of serious family illness and of an economic downturn that led to a drop in his wages as a stonecutter.92 He reached beyond his means, relying on credit extended by Staudinger and others. Already poor, he made himself even poorer, “purchasing Lepidoptera at such a rate,” he told Duncan Putnam in June 1877, “that ere I knew it I was head and (not last) heels in debt.”93 He borrowed money from Neumoegen, who, in turn, when “the market” sometimes turned against him, had to borrow money himself to lend to Strecker, “not an easy thing” for him “to do,” he wrote Strecker. “Yet in order to help you in a dark hour I will do it.”94 When he and Strecker began visiting each other’s homes, Neumoegen shared his “finds” unexpectedly, even divvying up a shipment from Utah of rare cocoons of Samia gloveri (a big maroon-colored moth described and figured by Strecker himself): three for him, four for Strecker. “Nobody but you would ever receive them from me,” he wrote, “and may it serve again as a sign of how much I am attached to you.”95
Strecker had passed something of a threshold, refusing to lend specimens to anyone for any purpose, including scientific ends. (Grote, for one, had always “generously placed all his material” in hands of any creditable naturalist who requested it.)96 Prouder than ever of the size of his collection, for the range of his American acquisitions spanning the continent but also, with ever-increasing fervor, for the extent of the species from far-off lands, exotic and tropical, he became a partner not only with Neumoegen but with much younger and naive collectors who, out of respect for him, went off to foreign places to get insects, promising to mail them to Strecker so he could identify and name them and then return them. Sometimes, without his eager young acolytes knowing it, he kept the best specimens for himself. Titian Peale admired his “mania,” Arthur Fuller made fun of his “insatiable maw,” but, in 1879, John Morris, then seventy-five, warned him about yielding so unconditionally to his Sehnsucht: “Why, man, you are too covetous—you must get over that ‘heartsickness’ and ‘take things cooly.’ ”97 To make up for the grinding deficits, Strecker turned more and more to selling butterflies and moths; in five years, he would be publicized in The Naturalist’s Directory, a widely circulated record of naturalists, as “a man who buys and sells Lepidoptera from all parts of the world.”98
The butterfly people who fought over naming, identification, the face of nature, and, especially, over collecting suffered a good deal because of their contending beating hearts, although hardly in equal measure. After nine months of estrangement, the Yankees Scudder and Edwards reconciled, not by apology but by resuming a correspondence that, all things considered, they could not do without. Scudder buckled down to work on American butterflies, research that would go on until the end of the 1880s and the publication of his magesterial three volumes. Edwards, hobbled substantially by the collapse of his coal business, in March 1873, after some fierce bargaining, signed a contract with the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which, he noted, “changed our whole mode of doing business”; instead of sending his coal from West Virginia by barge and boat, he’d decided to move all of it by railroad. The transaction “drove butterflies nearly out of his head,” he told Henry Edwards, and did nothing to enrich him. Two years later, his company went bankrupt, making him poor despite owning “a great deal of property.” It was a condition from which he would never really recover.99 He lost his salary, could not raise enough money to pay his artists, and even planned to sell part or all of his butterflies for cash to pay creditors. Among his buyers was Scudder, who, in an act of unusual generosity despite their falling out, mailed him hundreds of dollars for some specimens. “I ought not to make you pay for these things,” Edwards wrote Scudder. “And yet I am compelled to utilize what I can.”100 He sold some of his “other” property “for a good sum,” and soon was back to “normal,” although no longer managing coal mines. Sometime in 1878, a neighbor bought the remains of Edwards’s coal business, leaving him with seven acres for his house and family, as well as several other scattered properties.101 Nothing now of consequence impeded Edwards’s work on butterflies, and he took the reins with an admirable ferocity. A great work would be the result.
Grote and Strecker fared less well. By the end of the 1870s, Grote’s family life was a mess, his children, whom he’d left with their step-grandmother, perhaps still in Alabama (it is unclear exactly when he got them back) and his father impoverished and extremely ill on Staten Island. Once at the center of cultural life in Buffalo, Grote now had few friends and little money, and in 1879 he lost his job as museum director, pushed out by the trustees, according to him, because of his espousal of evolution but also, apparently, because his shifting moods gave offense to many people. To make matters worse, when he left his job, the Buffalo Society of Natural Sciences kept his moth collection, on the ground that he owed the society money; the collection was his only valuable possession, with many rare type specimens (type specimens are those first described and named by the discoverer and play an indispensable role in the identification of an organism, against which all future revisions of the name are measured).102 In time, he retrieved his precious insects, but only after a volley of recriminatory letters charging that what he owed the society was “nothing compared” to what it owed him—his “collecting expenses,” his books, his assistant’s salary, “his seventy-four glass boxes of moths,” all out of his own pocket. He wanted them back. “The Society has no more claim on them, than it has on my clothes.… It has stripped me of everything, turned me out … I am quite a ruined man.”103
Circumstances worsened for Grote in the aftermath of the Strecker “Central Park Affair.” Despite the fact that the leadership had accepted his accusations, many criticized him not only for his assault on Strecker but also for emphasizing himself in his writings, a criticism that must have stung him, si
nce, in his writings on religion, he had made such an issue about placing the “Self” at the service of some larger moral purpose.104 In November 1875, Grote, in a startling turn, wrote to Strecker, “I hope that now there can be a possible truce between us. I desire to be good friends with everyone. My health is bad and I am afraid I have overworked myself.” In one year, however, he was at Strecker again, calling him, in a checklist of moths, “an incompetent writer” with “undoubted capacity for misunderstanding the simplest structure in insects.”105 Three years later—in the midst of writing New Infidelity and of his personal distress—Grote tried again to bury the hatchet, this time coming close to expressing doubts that Strecker had committed any crime at all in the American Museum of Natural History. “I have written to you several times endeavoring to heal the difference between us. You must know how you misrepresent me and I spare myself any written defense in consequence. If I have ever done you wrong,” he wrote, “I am willing to make you honorable amends. I desire for the sake of public decency that the warfare between us should cease and I offer you my services in any way in which I can assist you.”106 On one occasion, Strecker was tempted to give in, but after a friend reminded him that Grote had told too many people over too long a time that he was a liar, a light-fingered amateur, and a “forger” who had violated the ninth commandment (“Thou shalt not bear false witness”) and the tenth (“Thou shalt not covet”), he stopped short.107 If many people blamed Strecker for all the ugliness, Grote carried the burden as well, and he knew it; his feud with Strecker increased his instability and his isolation in Buffalo and, later, on Staten Island.
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