The Most Defiant Devil: William Temple Hornaday and His Controversial Crusade to Save American Wildlife

7. The Great War

137 7 ) _ THE GREAT WAR I F 1913 HAD been a whirlwind for William Temple Hornaday, the following year looked to be just as demanding. By the third week of January, the director of the New York Zoological Park already had two months of work piled up on his desk, as he told T. Gilbert Pearson of the Audubon Society. He had to edit the New York Zoological Society Annual Report, revise his now ten-year-old The American Natural History for Charles Scribner’s Sons, and prepare a series of lectures on wildlife conservation for the Forestry School at Yale University , which he later turned into a book. “Well, I am back from the Yale lecture; and I thank the Lord that it is over,” he wrote to Josie, who knew how uncomfortable public speaking made her husband.1 The Weeks-McLean Act had been a tremendous victory for the wildlife protection movement, but the fight was far from over, as Hornaday ’s public dispute with New York State attorney general Thomas Carmody at the close of the year clearly demonstrated. Hornaday tended to see nefarious economic interests behind the anticonservationist forces. “To them it is business, and they subscribe as business men always do subscribe when their profits are threatened,” he wrote in a New York Times Magazine piece. Commercial interests found common purpose with a strong, vocal bloc of states’ rights advocates and libertarians in the Senate who despised any regulation of personal behaviors. These senators had been asleep at the wheel when the Weeks-McLean language was slipped into the agricultural appropriations legislation the year before, and now they sought to counter the THE MOST DEFIANT DEVIL 138 effect of the pernicious new law by starving it of the funds necessary for adequate implementation.2 Hornaday had predicted this. As soon as Weeks-McLean had passed, he had recommended a tax on shotgun cartridges as an expedient remedy to provide ample funding and reduce reliance on a fickle Congress for cash. But Madison Grant had nipped the idea in the bud, and it carried no weight with sportsmen. Now Hornaday and other supporters of the act were in a bind. “The present situation is absolutely intolerable!” Hornaday wrote to Senator James O’Gorman, a New York Democrat. “The people of the country will not stand for it!” In early May 1914, Hornaday boarded the train to Washington to personally lobby senators for more appropriations for game wardens to enforce the act’s prohibition on spring shooting and bag limits. He took advantage of the occasion to present a public lecture at the Shoreham Hotel, one framed by his established progressive narrative of the selfish few damaging the interests of the much larger whole. The millions of “men and boys who are slaughtering our birds are levying a tribute on every American pocketbook,” Hornaday told the audience.3 In the upper chamber, Senator James Reed, a conservative Democrat from Missouri, led the opposition to funding what he dismissively referred to as “this alleged law,” the Weeks-McLean migratory bird act. Like many, Reed considered the law granting the federal government the right to regulate most species of migratory birds a clear violation of states’ rights protections in the U.S. Constitution. They expected that the U.S. Supreme Court would vote it down, and stalled for time by withholding the funds necessary for adequate enforcement. On Saturday , May 23, the senator attacked the act as a product of a lobby as powerful and self-motivated as the beef, sugar, and steel trusts. Then he took off the gloves and attacked none other than “that high priest of mercy, Mr. Hornaday,” by reading extracts from Two Years in the Jungle selected to paint Hornaday as the worst game hog in the world. “I desire to call attention to the fact that, if his heart is now tender and his soul is now shocked at the sight of a dead bird; if he has come to believe that those who occasionally shoot game are monsters engaged in the service of the devil and devoting their lives to acts of atrocity—if that is his present opinion—then, Mr. President, he has undergone a regeneration that has never been equaled since St. Paul saw the light that transformed him from Pagan into a Christian,” Reed declared. He added his own colorful commentary after reading each segment The...