Color photography created a tension between nonhuman nature and human nature, and so did chemical colors. In the same decades that British and German collectors searched the tropics for exotic butterflies, British and German chemists invented the first artificial colors, synthesized in the 1850s from aniline coal-tar compounds, and later as chemical alizarin. Synthetic alizarin reproduced an organic compound by the same name derived from the madder root, its invention “arguably a more significant step than the invention of aniline dyes,” the science writer Philip Ball has argued, since “it showed that organic chemists were becoming nature’s equal and that the natural dyes of the past could be replaced.”74 From the 1850s on, a human-made spectrum of color appeared not only in the exhibits of world’s fairs but in the latest fashions worn by visitors to the fairs, as well as in machine-made goods transformed by industrial design, dead things endowed with the appeal of living forms. Whether Americans were able to reconcile these two worlds of color for themselves, or whether they even cared or thought about it, is difficult (if not impossible) to establish. Did they prefer the unexpected and perishable tints and shades of living things to the “permanent” and “fast” palette of machine-produced things, the blue in a butterfly wing to the same blue in a magazine ad? Did they perceive artifactual red as more “beautiful” than organic red? Or did they view them as of equal value, together forming a whole no one had ever before experienced?
In 1899, Herman Strecker received from Europe several “magnificent aberrations” of exotic species, all produced artificially, he told Henry Skinner, “by roasting, starving, freezing, etc.” He admitted that “they were beautiful, but beautiful as they are, they never will give me the pleasure I have derived from those I possess that nature alone had a hand in.”75
The railroad had opened many people to a legion of lepidoptera, but it assaulted the environment, perhaps more than any other technological invention up to that time. Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the fauna of Coney Island, at the farthest tip of Brooklyn, were exceptional, as a cofounder of the Brooklyn Entomological Society, Franz Schaupp, reported in an 1880 essay, “Insect Life on Coney Island.” Many “white” animals, for instance—white frogs, white spiders, white grasshoppers, and, especially, many rare white beetles, exceedingly local—lived in small ponds “in immense numbers,” a mere hundred feet from “the shore rising and falling with flood and ebb tides,” Schaupp observed. “No doubt these little insects are the very aborigines of Coney Island.” Many white butterflies flew there, too, although Schaupp, a beetle man, didn’t mention these. Yet as early as 1880, Schaupp wrote, as a result principally of the railroad invasion that carried many people to the island and led to its “improvement,” these insects were beginning to “yield to the march of civilization, to the cruel merciless pale faces.” “Where but a few years ago” white beetles claimed “dominion” over the landscape, threatened “only by a stray [bug] hunter, now the ground is tramped by thousands and thousands, in long files and broad ranks, and the noble [beetles] present but a remnant of their former greatness.” By the 1890s, the beetles had departed, along with many other insect species, doubtless among them butterfly fauna.76
For William Henry Edwards, railroads were a blessing, but they also changed for the worse the world he had known as an old and a young man. They sealed the fate of one of his favorite destinations, Glenwood Springs, in Colorado, by 1900 a tourist center on a scale far greater than anything in the past, with thousands of Americans vacationing there—among them, the nature lover President Theodore Roosevelt. By this time, environmental conditions had fostered a decline in the varied butterfly and moth life encountered by Edwards during his 1893 visit, a decline caused by greater tourist crowds and the number of collectors. Ernest Oslar, an Englishman who aided Edwards in his work and collected with David Bruce in Glenwood Springs in the early days, chronicled the change in a 1919 letter to another collector, the rich physician, William Barnes: “Most all collectors tell the same story: Glenwood used to be the Mecca for moths, but is now N.G. [no good]. They all say that bugs get less and less every year. I found it myself. I practically took nothing worth having at Glenwood. In Durango I found the same conditions, other old time places nothing in quantity anywhere.” Things looked pretty grim, Oslar said; at the same time, he had just discovered another way to collect rare butterflies and moths, but one that would prove even more deadly to nature than the railroads. He mentioned a new vehicle capable of getting him quickly to good butterfly territory: the “auto or light truck” that had just come on the market. “They have excellent auto roads all over the Rocky Mt. districts, N-S, east and west, which would take one to many localities” with insects “never collected before,” he noted, urging Barnes to finance him so he could buy a truck of his own.77 More than likely, Oslar knew of lepidopterists who hunted by truck or car through the West. Otto Buchholz of Roselle Park, New Jersey, took his first cross-country trip by car in 1907, armed with a butterfly net, and Preston Clark, a millionaire manager of gold mines, and his wife “motored” to the Grand Canyon in 1916; he smashed his arm as he collected by mule along the trails.78
But the damage done to Glenwood Springs could not compare to that inflicted on West Virginia, symptomatic of the evil William Henry Edwards’s great-grandfather, Jonathan Edwards, had known lurked in the hearts of all men and women. By the end of the nineteenth century, mine wars had erupted along Paint Creek, Edwards’s old primal hunting grounds. A distant memory was the coal industry as Edwards had known it, consisting mostly of small mines; they’d been replaced by coal companies run by absentee owners in alliance with the big railroads, dictating conditions throughout the industry and herding workers into company-owned shacks at low wages, with little chance of advancement and no prospects for independence. In the strikes that began in 1897, owners evicted workers from company towns, forcing them to live in tents in the Paint Creek area. Mother Jones, the famed labor organizer, arrived to investigate in 1898, the same year Edwards finished his volume 3. His son, Willie, now head of the William Seymour Edwards Oil Company, had helped build this new economy.79
The mess had another dimension, one that reached well beyond West Virginia’s Kanawha County. In 1880, virgin forest had covered 90 percent of the state. At the edges Edwards had caught his first female Diana fritillary, an otherwise reclusive insect that spent most of its time hidden in the woods. By 1900, all that virgin forest had vanished in the wake of an unseemly collaboration of lumber companies and railroads. The lumber companies had moved in after pulling down the woods of Wisconsin, using newly invented band saws with “enormous power to transform timber into lumber” and relying on “endless belts of saw-edged steel traveling at a high velocity around a great pulley driven by steam or electricity,” to quote historian Ronald L. Lewis, author of a troubling account of forest destruction. But most responsible of all were the railroads, empowered by eastern capital; they were capable of meeting “the challenge of mountainous terrain” and of carrying immense loads of lumber nearly anywhere in the country. By 1900, a web of big and small lines had been dropped on the high forest, preparing the way for “sawmills, pulp mills, tanneries, and lumber camps.”80 The rail and the lumber companies would soon evacuate West Virginia, after laying waste to the landscape’s many species of hardwood trees and countless other species from all orders and families of animal life, including, one must assume, the lepidoptera. What had taken Europeans many hundreds of years to achieve, Americans had accomplished here and throughout the country in twenty.81
William Henry Edwards, with all his ecological insight, must have understood the meaning of the decimation of the trees. He had read Darwin’s books three times over, pored over the work of Ernst Haeckel, who’d first clearly defined “ecology,” and may have leafed through George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864), with its testimony to the reduction of the forest in Marsh’s native Vermont in his lifetime from three-fourths to one-fourth of its original size.82 Edwards may a
lso have been aware of the despairing views of Alfred Russel Wallace and August Weismann, naturalists he idolized, both of whom bemoaned the way Americans had “ruthlessly destroyed their native forests,” the outcome, as Wallace wrote in 1891, of “the fierce competition of great capitalists, farmers and manufacturers.”83
Only one meager clue exists (there may have been others) that Edwards shared these concerns—and that was when he tried to revive the baltimore checkerspots in Fraser’s swamp, acknowledging, at the very least, that some preventable, man-induced calamity had taken place. But what of the Diana fritillary and the zebra swallowtail, original work on which had virtually established Edwards’s transatlantic reputation? What clues do we find there? Surely he knew quite well that if you destroy the moist woodlands, you destroy these insects, which find shelter within the forests, and feed and breed only at the forest margins. In some ways Edwards was hostage to his own past but, even more, to his present and to his family—and, ironically, to his own son, Willie, in particular. A successful entrepreneur by the 1890s, Willie never seemed to care much about butterflies or about anything else in nature for its own sake. He preferred mineral extraction over the study of nature; the only “taxonomy” Willie took seriously was that of coal. In 1892 he wrote Coals and Cokes in West Virginia, a “hand-book” detailing the local “species” of coals and cokes and where to find them.84 By 1900 Willie clearly had the upper hand in the family, and his brother-in-law, Theodore Mead, grew to resent him. In 1935, long after Willie died, Mead wrote that taking his advice “was a great mistake as I should have specialized in biology where my inclination lay.”85 William Henry Edwards may have had reservations about the forests’ demise, which happened in his own lifetime. If he did, there is no record of them.
If Edwards was trapped in a contradiction, other butterfly people escaped it by backing reforms to protect nature from further despoiling. In 1900, Congress passed the Lacey Act, a federal capstone on the bird-protection movement banning shipment of “wild animals and birds” across state lines; the law helped prompt President Theodore Roosevelt, a lifelong naturalist, to establish more than fifty wildlife preserves.86 The federal and state governments, too, set aside many millions of acres of land to form parks and reserves to protect the forests and other natural resources, an extraordinary achievement given the national mantra that “the land is a form of capital and must be used to turn a profit,” to quote historian Donald Worster. “Without quite realizing it,” the country “put together an entirely new kind of commons—an American commons—where individuals may go to find natural resources but which no one can take into his or her exclusive possession.” The pro-market journalist Peter Huber also holds a favorable view of the history of the park system but from an angle quite different from Worster’s. Claiming the mantle of Roosevelt, whom he professes to admire, Huber argues, in Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists, that the parks’ appeal is that they provide pleasure in the “visible aesthetics” of nature, which most Americans want to enjoy; on the other hand, by confining nature’s “aesthetics” principally to the parks and to the big “visible items” (“the redwoods, cougars, and whales”), people can do what they wish with nature or “property” beyond the parks, guided only by “the market.” “Everyone knows where public authority begins and ends,” Huber writes, given the “well-demarcated boundaries between private and public space.” Both Worster and Huber appreciate the parks, the former because they challenge the goal of “development” and moneymaking, the latter because the parks justify development beyond their borders.87
Huber has history on his side, for even though the parks and reserves testified to what seemed a magnificent commitment to saving nature, they were not immune to the impact of America’s other identity, its commitment to extraction and profit. After 1916, under the new National Park Service, the parks became tourist sites, reshaped by consumerism and riddled by roads.88 Nor did they do much between 1890 and 1920 to stop development in vaster areas beyond their boundaries, and they may, in fact, have helped give rise to that development; as one reserve or park after another appeared, the country settled complacently into a tremendous industrial expansion. Later in the twentieth century, the railroads declined as automobiles and trucks displaced them, but they still dictated government policy throughout the period of the park system’s major consolidation. In 1915, West Virginia opened the Monongahela National Forest in response to the mayhem of deforestation, but, in the words of historian Ronald L. Lewis, the state “did little to check, much less reverse, the destruction of its own environment.”89
As the park system came into being, so did industrial agriculture and, with it, the gradual demise of family farming, with unfortunate consequences for the country’s entomological diversity and natural science. When, in the 1870s, William Henry Edwards and others studied butterflies and moths, they did so to understand the insects’ living character and to do justice to them as autonomous beings in the natural world. Twenty years later, hundreds of Americans pored over the life of insects, including of lepidoptera, not with Edwards’s eyes but rather to eradicate them as enemies of the people, in the name of economic entomology, a movement to help farmers clear their lands of all obstacles to profitable production.
Throughout the colonial period, European settlers had cleared virgin forests on an epic scale to make way for family farming in New England and in the South, inflicting a simplified uniformity, wiping out many native insects, and making the land vulnerable to foreign species that settlers had unknowingly brought with them and that had no established enemies in their new habitat.90 Yet in a pattern of secondary succession, it was family farms themselves, with their various husbandry and crops, spreading everywhere north and west, that reconstituted this denuded geography into a new hybrid landscape, fostering the rise of many kinds of insects and insect predators and thereby re-creating, to some degree the natural balance that heedless deforestation had destroyed.91 Nevertheless as the wholesale cutting down of timber persisted, Americans began to pursue—side by side with small-scale family farming—a new and radically different, capitalistic, mass-production agriculture, single-cropped, mechanized, and facilitated by railroads that canceled out the strengths of the family regime. By the 1890s, mass production had reached California, with irrigated orchards managed on industrial principles, financed by absentee owners who depended on sweated labor in lieu of machines, growing single crops (lemons, pears, seedless oranges, and so forth) in volume for shipment by refrigerated railcars to Chicago and points east.92 The new industrial order produced an ecological world even more one-dimensional than the colonial one, and brought on infestations of epidemic proportions.
In the monocultural context, and without checks, a single invading insect army could devour many acres of crops in a single sunny day, a circumstance that Charles Valentine Riley, more than anyone, converted into a mandate for a new science. A brilliant, self-educated naturalist like Edwards, Grote, and Strecker, Riley had a similar passion for natural history; he discovered that viceroys mimicked monarchs. He admired the marvelous colors and forms of all insect orders. Yet as Missouri’s state entomologist between 1868 and 1875, he embraced the new applied entomology to rid commercial farms of insect pests; they were only 2 percent of all insects but had enough clout to push the other 98 percent out of his mind.93
The practice of economic entomology can be traced in America back at least to the late eighteenth century, as agricultural interests came to penetrate every point on the compass, enlisting advances in natural history in behalf of the administration and control of the natural world. So, too, the Europeans, Linnaeus and Buffon among them, treated natural history from the angle of usefulness, with animals and plants seen as servants to human interests.94 It did not begin, however, to mature as a discrete independent economic science in its own right until the 1860s, when the British and the French adopted it as a necessity, particularly under monocultural conditions. (In 1868, Boisduval, the na
mer of so many American butterflies, presided over a Paris exhibition of methods for destroying insect ravagers of vineyards.)95 But it was in the United States that economic entomology triumphed as nowhere else, thrust onto the national stage principally by Charles Valentine Riley.96 After Riley successfully used chemical insecticides in Missouri (especially Paris green, an arsenical compound) to stop a potato blight, Congress appointed him, in 1876, to head the new Entomological Commission. The commission focused on breeding grounds and the study of life histories as the means of stopping insect invasions: search out where eggs are laid or what plants the larvae fed on, Riley argued, and banish pests forever. Riley next became the director of the new Division of Entomology in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a small agency created in 1862 that had rapidly expanded. In 1884, he created a federal government journal, Insect Life, the title misleading since the publication mostly had to do with death. A few years later, the Hatch Act funded agricultural experiment stations in every state of the union, giving teeth to the economic control of insects.
In 1889, James Fletcher, Scudder’s dear friend and a champion of the new economic science in Canada, was elected the first non-American president of the entomological section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, doubtless at Scudder’s prompting. Earlier in his life, Fletcher had studied butterflies and moths for their own sakes, and his fondest memory was of the “beating heart” kind. Privately, moreover, in a letter to Scudder he scorned “economic entomology as a stupid subject.”97 But in his presidential address, Fletcher heaped praise on the Hatch Act for giving “great impulse to practical science in all lines,” foreshadowing decades dedicated to “the discovery, as soon as possible of practical remedies for the various injurious insects which destroy produce.” “Such an opportunity for showing the value of Science has never before occurred.”98 Hundreds of specialists were hired to research life histories, insect control, insecticides, and crop practices, their aim “to defeat the insect menace,” as Riley’s successor, Leland O. Howard, called it. The men received such good salaries as to form “the first market for economic entomologists in this country.”99 In his heyday in the mid-1880s, Riley himself made $2,500 a year at the Division of Entomology in the Department of Agriculture (a U.S. congressman made $5,000); Joseph Lintner, the state entomologist of New York, in his single stuffy office with no staff, made, of course, much less. In 1880, no schools taught insect study; twenty years later, the United States had more schools and experts than all the countries of the world combined. Entomology was now a comfortable career path, leading to big offices and generous salaries—on average, $6,500 a year (with the figure for incoming congressmen still at $5,000), with entomologists employed by land-grant universities, experiment stations, and the federal government, all, in fact, working collaboratively to battle insect marauders.100 By 1900, the Division of Entomology had evolved into “the greatest entomological organization in the world.”101
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