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

8. Fighting the Establishment

158 8 ) _ FIGHTING THE ESTABLISHMENT I N MARCH 1920, Hornaday received what he regarded as payback for his vitriolic attacks on opponents of World War I and others he deemed un-American during the Red Scare. David Hirschfield, the New York City commissioner of accounts, had conducted a year-long, thinly veiled witch hunt into Hornaday’s stewardship of the New York Zoological Park that now culminated in a report that dubbed Hornaday “a monarch in his own principality.”1 Hirschfield’s report accused the director of the zoo of deliberately firing a whistle-blower, keeping shoddy financial records, engaging in unethical business practices, and committing nepotism through employing his nephews, the Mitchells, and purchasing grain from his son-in-law’s family firm in Kansas. “The whole thing has been a travesty covering the purpose, which has been admitted by some of those interested in his scheme, to get political control of the park and put politicians they want to reward in charge of it,” Hornaday responded to reporters who questioned him. To his friend John Phillips, he wrote in private, “Hirschfield being a Polish German Jew is angry at me because of my war on the Germans during the war; and there are others in the Administration who, I have been told, are angry at me because I have made fun in print of the Sinn Feiners,” the Irish revolutionaries . Hornaday never seriously fretted over the report. It was more a distraction and “a pitiable object” than a real threat—but it wasted valuable time and strained his relations with city officials during yet another series of protracted negotiations over a wage increase for his staff. Meanwhile the death of his sister Mary the month before and his fIghTINg The esTablIshmeNT 159 financial woes in the chaotic postwar economy added to his troubles.2 A conflict with the governor of Alaska and sportsmen over regulations in the northernmost territory did not help matters. With the war over and the food supply more secure, Hornaday sided with those who believed in a thoroughgoing reform of Alaska game regulations. But, as was often the case, he argued vehemently with other conservationists over precise details. He especially objected to the contention that brown bears and bald eagles were pests deserving no protection. In February, he issued a pamphlet that argued that it was self-defeating for the game-meat-dependent Alaskans to want the right to kill more game since it would endanger their supply. Despite the relatively small population of Alaska (55,000 according to the 1920 census), Hornaday saw the ominous components (underregulation, construction of the federally funded Alaska Railway, and better firearms) of the buffalo slaughter falling into place once again. The combination of these elements would, according to his reasoning, naturally create the missing part of his formula for extermination, the market for game meat. Governor Riggs found particularly insulting Hornaday’s attitude that distant outsiders could better manage the game than locals themselves could do. As he had done with John Burnham almost a decade before, George Bird Grinnell advised Riggs to ignore Hornaday. “He is often abusive and irritating, but I suspect the wise thing to do is to ignore what he says and writes,” Grinnell recommended. “Dr. Hornaday represents himself and a proportion of the sentimentalists of the country, most of whom are women and children.” Two months later, however, the governor still found Hornaday impossible to ignore. “This man Hornaday, by his lies, is doing more damage to the game than any other person,” Riggs wrote of Hornaday’s assertion that the changes would lead to the extinction of the brown bear. “He is simply disgusting.”3 Hornaday’s relationship with Grinnell, which had been frosty since the Audubon gun-money debacle nine years earlier, completely broke in autumn 1920. Their positions on hunting had progressed along two separate tracks since the introduction of the automatic and pump shotguns. Over the years, Hornaday had increasingly blamed Grinnell’s constituency, sportsmen, for the decline of American wildlife . “Yes, who is really to blame for the absurd hunting license fees, the joke bag ‘limits’ and the criminally long killing seasons?” he asked in a 1920 edition of the Wild Life Protection Fund Bulletin. “The answer THE MOST DEFIANT DEVIL 160 is: Up to 90 per cent, it is the sportsmen themselves!” Statements such as these and continued reliance on the phrase “game...