Mr. Hornaday's War (27 page)

“Entertaining, passionate, erudite—
The Passing of the Great Race
did for scientific racism what
The Communist Manifesto
did for scientific socialism,” writes historian Jonathan Peter Spiro in a biography of Madison Grant. “Fortunately for Marx and Grant, they both died before they could see the horrors that resulted when a regime embraced their philosophy and tried to remake society in its name.”
49

Spiro points out that, to Grant, the cause of conservation and his battle to preserve the purity of the race were both intertwined and both deeply personal. He was trying to save an old, threatened world, a world as safe for the pale patricians of the Upper East Side as for the monk seal and the eider duck. Surveying the hordes coming ashore at Ellis Island, Spiro writes, Grant “had to accept the fact that yet another mammal—the blue-eyed, long-headed Teutons—needed to be added to the list of endangered North American species. After all, it is
one thing to learn that the bison are headed for extinction; it is quite another to learn that you yourself are similarly doomed.” Even so, his conclusions were so repellent that when Grant died in 1937, his family fed his personal papers into a fire.
50

While there is no evidence that Hornaday was a “scientific racist” like Grant, there is no question that he was (by modern lights) shockingly insensitive to matters of race. In
Our Vanishing Wild Life,
he wrote that “toward wildlife the Italian laborer is a human mongoose . . . wherever they settle, their tendency is to root out the native American and take his place and his income,”
51
a charge as unfocused and dangerous as a blast of buckshot. When some Piegan Indians stole a buffalo that he'd killed in Montana, he called them “a gang of coyotes in human form.”
52
And his explanation for why he was now exhibiting Ota Benga in a cage did not quite suffice. “I do not wish to offend my colored brothers' feelings or the feelings of anyone, for that matter,” Hornaday told the press. “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.”
53

In other words, Ota Benga was a vivid display of human evolutionary progress as described by Darwin—the steady progression from “lower” to “higher” living forms. Hornaday was not alone in these beliefs, of course. The
New York Evening Post
pointed out, helpfully, that Benga was not actually at the bottom rung of human development. Because he wasn't coal-black, there were darker-skinned blacks who were lower.
54

(In an interview with a newspaper in Bridgeport, Connecticut, twenty years later, Hornaday further clarified his views about the hierarchy of sentient life, including animals. “There is not the slightest doubt that the highest races of animals have more intelligence than the lowest races of man. . . . The highest animals are far better developed, more consistent, worthier and even more spiritual than the lowest men.” Furthermore, Hornaday added, “if there is a direct, personal, high interest in the lives of human beings, I have every reason to believe that the same interest extends to animal beings. If all humans have souls, some animals have souls.”
55
In further defense of four-legged beings, Hornaday added in one of his books,
Minds and Manners of Wild Animals
: “If every man devoted to his affairs and to the affairs of his city and state the same measure of intelligence and
honest industry that every warm-blooded wild animal devotes to its affairs, the people of this world would abound in good health, prosperity, peace and happiness.”)
56

But the clamor, and the outrage, persisted. On September 11, Hornaday seemed to amend his earlier position, telling the
New York Times,
“[I]f Ota Benga is in a cage, he is only there to look after the animals. If there is a notice on the cage, it is only put there to avoid answering the many questions that are asked about him. He is absolutely free. The only restriction that is put upon him is to prevent him from getting away from the keepers. This is done for his own safety.”
57
The director also disavowed the Darwinian connection. “I hope my colored bretheren
[sic]
will not take the absurd position that I am giving the exhibition to show the close analogy of the African savage to the apes. Benga is in the primate house because that was the most comfortable place we could find for him.”

Nevertheless, Hornaday ultimately bowed to public pressure. After eighteen days, he had Benga removed from public display, although the little man—now a star, but one attempting to hide—continued to live at the zoo. Afterward, Hornaday was dismissive of the whole drama, calling what had happened an “absurd matter. . . . The whole episode is good comic-opera material, and nothing more. When the history of the Zoological Park is written, this incident will form its most amusing passage.”
58

The furor gradually died down. Toward the end of 1906, Benga was released into the custody of the Reverend Gordon, superintendent of a church-sponsored New York orphanage called the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum. But the public's frenzy of interest in this “cannibal” from darkest Africa continued unabated. In January 1910, Gordon arranged for Benga to be relocated to Lynchburg, Virginia, away from the unpleasant glare of the big city. (It was, of course, a crashing irony that Gordon's idea of where to send Benga for greater peace and safety was to move him to the South.) Tutored by black Lynchburg poet Anne Spencer, his English improved, and he sometimes attended elementary school at the local Baptist Seminary.
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Ota Benga also liked to frequent the woods around Lynchburg to fish, hunt, and gather wild honey. Often he was accompanied by a small gang of white boys, aged five to eleven, many of them children of the town's most prominent citizens. Despite some worries that Benga might be a subversive influence on the boys, the youngsters
loved these forays into the forest with the little African. In an interview nearly eighty years later, one of them recalled that when Benga strung a long bow that was as long as he was tall, it sounded “like Beethoven.” Another described Benga as a hero, a genuine pal, a “close relative.” It was the children, more than anyone, who saw him not as the Other, but simply as a human being, no matter how small or dark.
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Benga showed the boys how to imitate the calls that would attract quail and wild turkey. He showed them that bee stings suffered in the hunt for honey, rather than being painful, were actually hilarious, the pygmy equivalent of slipping on a banana peel. Back in the town, Benga learned to make compromises with the society that he was living in. His name was Americanized to “Otto Bingo.” The pointed teeth that once had been used to stigmatize him as a cannibal were now capped by a dentist, so his smile looked cheerful rather than horrifying. He wore trousers, shirts, and shoes, though somewhat uncomfortably. On certain moonlit nights, often accompanied by his band of boys, Ota Benga would return to the forest dressed only in a bark loincloth. There he would light a ceremonial fire, dance the ceremonial dances, and sing the ceremonial songs that were to be performed only on such occasions. He told the boys that this was how he had danced and sung in Africa. As Peter Matthiessen writes of such ancient tribal practices in
African Silences:
“All songs are implicitly sacred. ‘The forest gives us this song,' the people say. ‘The forest
is
this song.' ”
61

But outside of Lynchburg, the Great War was raging and Ota knew it, from having heard people talking. He knew that the war had even spread to the Congo, to his beloved African forest. He understood that it would be impossible to return home. He confided to the boys, sometimes with tears in his eyes, that he wanted to go home. But now he couldn't go home. Even Samuel Verner, the man he knew as Fwela, the man who had rescued him and promised one day to take him back to Africa, had disappeared, pursuing schemes and business ventures that had led mostly to poverty and despair. Benga could not afford a steamship ticket back home, even if it were possible for him to go there. And once he arrived back on the Kasai River, in the Congo, he might well discover that he no longer belonged there, either. He had become a man without a country, a forest without a song.

Increasingly despondent, on March 20, 1916, in the late afternoon,
he walked into the woods outside Lynchburg. He built a ceremonial fire. He knelt in front of it and broke off the caps that covered his pointed teeth. Then he took out a revolver he had stolen earlier that day, pointed it at his heart, and pulled the trigger. His small body was found there the next day, sprawled beside the fire-pit. He was later buried in an unmarked grave, in the black section of the Old City Cemetery.

On a sunny March morning in 1910, an excitable and self-involved columnist from the
New York World
who went by the pen name of Kate Carew was sent by her editor over to the Bronx Zoo, to see if spring was stirring among the animals. It was not an assignment Carew particularly relished. In fact, she confided to her readers, the prospect of making a trip to the malodorous zoo made her feel “so mortified—my dears, I could have sat right down and had a good cry.” She decided to begin by interviewing “the Sultan of the Zoo, that renowned naturalist, author, explorer and hunter, William T. Hornaday.”
1

When Carew was ushered into Hornaday's high-ceilinged office, adorned with trophy heads of a mountain sheep and a ten-point whitetail buck, as well as a small arsenal of wall-mounted rifles and shotguns, “the sun shone through Director Hornaday's window and bathed him where he sat at his desk, a thickset man with large, fine, kind eyes, a long nose of mixed architecture and a black and white beard arranged in stripes. . . . The cut of that beard and his olive coloring, and the heavy blackness of his brows and eyes—perhaps something in their form, too, give him a Latin look.”

Carew went on to report that she had indeed found “the sweet trouble of spring” stirring up the animals at the zoo, and that the distinguished director Hornaday had laughed delightedly when she told him that she'd noticed one of the grizzly bears acting like a kitten. “Oh, yes,” he said. “He's beginning to feel the spring.” The warmth
and friskiness in the air caused enormous changes in the animals' behavior, Hornaday explained—the bears, for instance, often started tearing things up in their excitement. When Carew told Hornaday a funny story about her cat, he laughed knowingly again. “I can easily imagine a cat doing all that,” he said. “Cat psychology is very complex and mysterious, and cats have a sense of humor, too—their methods of play show that to an observant eye.”

This was the kind of fawning publicity Hornaday had grown acustomed to—and why the opprobrium of the Ota Benga incident had come as such a shock.

Newspaper photos of Hornaday taken around this time show a distinguished-looking man seemingly settling into a contented middle age. He's dressed like a Wall Street banker, wearing a conservative pinstriped suit with a waistcoat and watch fob and a high, stiff “turnover” collar, and a tidily trimmed graying beard. He does not appear to be entirely comfortable stuffily starched and buttoned up in his Sunday best. Years earlier, when he was on his great collecting expedition in India and Borneo, he'd written his new love, Josphine, that “if you should actually
see
me as I come from hunting when out in the jungles, I fear you would refuse to even look upon me again. I don't know what it is, but dirt and old clothes stick to me naturally, and become me but too well. It shows a depraved taste, I know, but it does my heart good to wipe everything on my pants.”
2

Despite his distinguished appearance in the photograph, and his smart suit, it's the eyes that give him away: dark and ferocious, they seem to be filled with unearthly, unsettling luminescence. They are not “civilized” at all. They are the eyes of a man determined to change the world. (One newspaper feature writer who came to visit said that Hornaday had “very big black eyes . . . they look like none you ever saw before; they seem to smolder and smoke like charred embers in a fire.”)
3

In 1906, he was awarded an honorary doctor of science degree from the University of Pittsburgh (and later from Yale), so he was now “Dr. Hornaday,” with the letters ScD appended to his growing trophy case of degrees, appointments, and publications. By now, Hornaday had begun to achieve national renown as an author, adventurer, naturalist, and defender of wildlife. One day, the
New York World-Telegram
sent over famed newspaperman A. J. Liebling just to do a story about Hornaday's birthday (though Hornaday turned out to be much more interested in talking about the plight of the white rhinoceros).
4

Yet all his newfound fame was little comfort. As director of the New York Zoological Park, Hornaday had frequent contact with zoologists, zookeepers, collectors, and curators around the country and around the world. Combined with his own personal travels to some of the globe's remotest outposts, as a peripatetic hunter, collector, and student of natural history, he had an almost unparalleled view of the status of birds and wildlife across the home planet. And what he had begun to see now, at the dawning of a new century, scared him to the depths of his being.

In his modest office at the New York zoological park, Hornaday later wrote in his unpublished autobiography, he went into “executive session,” trying to come to grips with this terrible fear. Everything he knew and had learned, everywhere he had been, forced him to the conclusion that the birds and game of the United States were being destroyed faster than they could reproduce. The natural balance had been tipped. It was as if a vast, wide-rimmed bowl were emptying faster than it was filling up, and the outcome of this imbalance was as inexorable as gravity. If the slaughter was not stopped, a vast wave of extinction would sweep across the world.