CHAPTER THREE

Forging Boundaries, Creating Occupational Space

THE GATHERING

On the morning of 26 September 1883 nearly two dozen of the nation’s leading ornithologists gathered in the library of the American Museum of Natural History. They ventured to New York from as far away as Oregon, Louisiana, and Canada in response to an urgent call that J. A. Allen, Elliott Coues, and William Brewster had issued two months previously. A sense of anticipation filled the room as Brewster stepped up to the podium and called to order the inaugural meeting of the American Ornithologists’ Union.1 Over the next three days members of the fledgling organization adopted a constitution and set of bylaws, elected officers, appointed committees, voted in new members, and resolved to initiate a periodical. The official report of the proceedings commented favorably on the “utmost harmony” that had prevailed throughout the deliberations and predicted that the founding of the AOU would “mark an important era in the progress of ornithology in America.”²

Though with a different cast of characters, during this period a similar scene was repeatedly played out in meeting halls across the United States. As American science matured and diversified in the decades surrounding the turn of the century, its practitioners increasingly sought to organize themselves into specialized national societies. A desire to promote research, acknowledge scientific achievement, and define the boundaries of emerging disciplines and professions played an important role in the creation of many of these new societies.³ For some organizations, like the American Society of Zoologists created in 1889, the attempt to further that set of agendas translated into a restrictive membership policy effectively excluding not only most amateur practitioners, but even those with paid positions in museums, governmental agencies, and other nonacademic institutions.⁴ Other national disciplinary societies, like the American Chemical Society established in 1876, adopted a more inclusive strategy that united a broad spectrum of enthusiasts.⁵

The founders of the AOU decided to pursue a middle course between these extremes. Even the most ardent scientific ornithologists recognized the crucial role that collectors, hunters, dealers, taxidermists, and others continued to play in their field. Perhaps more importantly, most scientific ornithologists also conceded that a large membership base was essential to support the ambitious periodical the AOU hoped to publish. While anxious to maintain their authority, control the direction of research, and fulfill their disciplinary and professional aspirations, they were not yet ready to bar the larger ornithological community entirely from their doors. The founders of the AOU attempted to resolve their dilemma by establishing a two-tiered membership structure—composed of a few “active members,” predominantly scientific ornithologists who effectively controlled the organization, and a much larger number of “associate members,” who provided much of the income upon which it depended to survive. Through this hierarchical membership strategy, AOU leaders sought to achieve the best of both worlds.

Despite reports of accord at the founding meeting, the AOU soon found itself embroiled in a series of controversies and struggles. In the face of opposition both in the United States and abroad, the union fought to maintain the taxonomic focus of American ornithology and to establish a single, authoritative system of scientific nomenclature for North American birds.⁶ At the same time the organization strove to brighten the dismal employment prospects within the field of ornithology. And when one of its most prominent members became involved in a public scandal involving the granddaughter of John James Audubon, the AOU was also forced to grapple with the issue of how to deal with the extra-scientific activities of the ornithologists affiliated with it. The most recurrent controversy in the new organization, however, involved the two-tiered membership structure adopted at the founding meeting.

Not surprisingly, many of those excluded from active membership—the seat of power and authority in the AOU—resented it. Critics repeatedly charged that the society was elitist and that associate members were being asked to support an organization in which they were denied a real voice. Eventually, as the volume of complaint continued to mount, AOU leaders responded with a series of reforms. However, they managed to keep the basic hierarchical structure of the organization intact.

For much of the second half of the nineteenth century the ornithological community remained heterogeneous and inclusive. These once permeable boundaries began to solidify with the creation of the AOU. At a time when there were few professional positions and no advanced degrees in the field, active membership in the AOU provided an important means of certifying an individual’s scientific accomplishment. It was what one AOU leader later called the “equivalent to the granting of a degree in ornithology.”⁷ But even as they successfully defended their right to differentiate themselves from the larger ornithological community, AOU leaders sought to strike a balance between the need to establish their authority and autonomy and their desire to maintain the goodwill, specimens, observations, and funds provided by that larger community.

THE NUTTALL CLUB

The first ornithological society in the United States was created in the early 1870s, when several young bird enthusiasts from Cambridge, Massachusetts—William Brewster, Ruthven Deane, and Henry W. Henshaw—began gathering regularly to share their collecting exploits and pore over Audubon’s Birds of America.8 Gradually others with a similar interest joined the weekly climb up the steep steps to Brewster’s attic, including Henry A. Purdie, a Boston businessman in his early thirties who was ten years older, but no less enthusiastic, than his fellow collectors, and W. E. D. Scott, who had recently enrolled in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard.

After two years of informal meetings, in November 1873 the group decided to found the Nuttall Ornithological Club and invited four additional members to join. Named after Thomas Nuttall, the well-known British naturalist who was a lecturer in natural history at Harvard in the early nineteenth century and author of a popular Manual of the Ornithology of the U.S. and Canada (1832, 1834), the new organization elected a slate of officers, adopted a constitution, and drew up a set of bylaws.⁹ The formal requirements for membership were straightforward and minimal. Resident members were to be elected from “persons living in the vicinity of Cambridge” who were “specially interested in ornithology,” while corresponding members were to be elected from “persons residing at a distance.”¹⁰ From the beginning the organization attracted individuals with varying levels of expertise and from differing social, occupational, and educational backgrounds. The one prominent exception to the generally inclusive membership policy was women, who were barred from resident membership in the Nuttall Club for the next century.¹¹ A common interest in collecting and studying North American birds united the youthful but otherwise diverse group of wealthy gentlemen, businessmen, taxidermists, natural history dealers, and students at Harvard College and the Lawrence Scientific School who joined the organization.

Nuttall Club leaders soon encountered difficulty maintaining interest in the new venture, and by the autumn of 1875 they were debating whether “the N.O.C. should live or die.”¹² They eventually decided to rejuvenate the lethargic society through a vigorous membership drive and the publication of a quarterly journal. C. J. Maynard, a taxidermist and natural history dealer with extensive publishing experience, and founding member Henry Purdie were elected joint editors of the new enterprise.¹³ The two proudly placed the twenty-eight-page inaugural issue of the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club before the membership early in May 1876.

Problems with the publication arose immediately. Sorting out the details from surviving records is difficult.¹⁴ What is clear is that in late May 1876, J. A. Allen, who had become a resident member only one month earlier, gained election as an associate editor and then editor-in-chief of the Bulletin. Allen then arranged for several prominent ornithologists and Nuttall Club corresponding members— Elliott Coues, George N. Lawrence, and Spencer F. Baird—to be named associate editors.¹⁵ Maynard was furious at what he viewed as a coup and soon severed all connections with the organization.¹⁶ For the next seven years, reviewing potential papers, editing proofs, procuring subscribers, addressing labels, and other activities associated with keeping the periodical afloat provided a central focus for the Nuttall Club.¹⁷

Another incident two years after Allen began editing the Bulletin also engendered controversy and threatened the authority of the young organization. The episode began at an unusually well-attended meeting on 28 January 1878, which was devoted to the “sparrow question,” an issue then raging in the local and national press. Beginning in the early 1850s, urban residents in the United States had imported and released thousands of English sparrows (Passer domesticus) in an attempt to establish the common European species on their side of the Atlantic. Importers valued the bird not only as a tangible reminder of the Old World fauna for which many immigrants yearned, but also as a likely predator of noxious insect larvae.¹⁸ Unlike most native birds, English sparrows seemed to thrive in the bustling, burgeoning cities. The species quickly expanded beyond the initial points of introduction as a stowaway on grain shipments carried on the extensive railroad network that connected American cities.¹⁹

By the 1870s the initial optimism surrounding sparrow introduction was clearly on the wane. Some observers began to express concern that the “pugnacious, irascible, irritable creatures” were devouring more grain than insects, while driving out native species.²⁰ As these negative reports came to light, critics spoke against new sparrow introductions and promoted eradication programs to reduce existing populations.

The two major protagonists in the “sparrow wars” were both prominent ornithologists. Army surgeon Elliott Coues, the most vocal and persistent critic of the bird, represented the views of most ornithologists. His primary opponent was Thomas M. Brewer, the physician, publisher, and author who had been an early advocate of sparrow introduction in Boston and one of the few ornithologists to remain a staunch supporter of the much maligned bird. Coues and Brewer skirmished over the issue in print several times before meeting together in Washington early in January 1878. According to Coues, during that meeting he suggested that the Nuttall Club, to which both men belonged, debate the question and issue an official ruling.²¹

The club’s sparrow meeting itself turned out to be uneventful. Seventeen of the twenty-three resident members attended, and all uniformly condemned the feathered intruder. Among those who joined the chorus of criticism were not only more experienced members, like Brewster, Purdie, Allen, and Deane, but also several new additions, including Theodore Roosevelt, a Harvard sophomore who had joined only a few months earlier, and Henry D. Minot, a Harvard freshman and close friend of Roosevelt.²² Noticeably absent was the sparrow’s most vocal champion, Brewer, who turned down an invitation to attend.²³ Abstracts of the proceedings were widely reprinted in local newspapers and at least one national periodical.²⁴

The Nuttall Club’s condemnation of the sparrow provoked a strong reaction in the local press. Several anonymous editorials ridiculed the organization as a body of “Cambridge juveniles” and “precocious boys” entirely unqualified to speak with authority on the issue in question.²⁵ Allen and other Nuttall leaders initially decided not to respond and thereby draw further attention to the embarrassing attacks. Although Brewer repeatedly denied the charge, most members suspected that he was responsible for the traitorous outbursts.²⁶ The final straw came in yet another anonymous editorial in the Boston Journal that referred to the Nuttall Club as an “association of overmodest young gentlemen, comprising lads fitting for college and undergraduates, with a sprinkling of others a few years their seniors” who boldly “undertook to settle ‘the sparrow question’ for the entire nation.”²⁷ As Allen wrote to Nuttall President Brewster, the abusive editorial was “too much for me & I could keep silent no longer.”²⁸

Allen fired off letters to several Boston papers in an attempt to repair the Nuttall Club’s tarnished reputation. He pointed out that the organization was an “association of persons interested in the study of ornithology,” whose membership was really “national in character, every publishing ornithologist in the United States being identified with it.” Even sparrow proponent Thomas M. Brewer was a resident member. While it was true that there were many young undergraduate members, there were also several Harvard graduates and “officers connected with scientific departments” at that distinguished institution. Allen concluded by claiming that the recent reports of the sparrow meeting in Boston papers were “unfair,” “misleading,” and riddled with “gross misstatements.”²⁹ Brewster also publicly defended the group before the issue gradually faded from the Boston papers.³⁰

A series of events during the next five years proved an even greater threat to the organization. Failure to attract a quorum (five members) at several meetings in 1879 led to the abandonment of the ambitious weekly meeting schedule. In the hope of achieving greater participation at each meeting, members voted to amend the bylaws to make the regular meeting times on the first and third Monday evenings of each month between 1 October and 15 June. Counteracting this change, though, was a drop in resident membership from a high of twenty-five in 1878 to seventeen by 1880.³¹ The young men who comprised the bulk of the club’s membership had graduated or gone off to make their way in the world without attracting replacements. The decrease in attendance at the meetings became precipitous by the fall of 1882. In October of that year and January of the next, scheduled meetings were canceled for “want of quorum.” Following a single meeting in February 1883, no meetings were called until June, at which only five members were present. Clearly the organization was floundering.

CREATING THE AOU

The apathy that had gripped the Nuttall Ornithological Club was one of several factors that precipitated plans to organize American ornithologists on a national level. Brewster, a moving force behind the Nuttall Club, was especially discouraged at the continued inability to attract a quorum at meetings. In a letter of 10 February 1883, he voiced his growing frustration and hinted at a drastic solution he had recently been contemplating:

The home [resident] members, with the exception of Purdie and Allen, don’t seem to care a hang whether the Club and its organ live or die. We had our third blank meeting last Monday; only four members present. I often feel tempted to go to work on a plan I have had in mind for some time, one which includes the dissolution of the Club and the organization of a new association which shall consist only of persons who care enough about ornithology to do their share of the work. ... An American Ornithologists’ Union, limited to, say, twelve members, could, I think, be made up in such a way as to be a very strong institution.32

Meanwhile, a second development suggested the need for a truly national ornithological society. The recent publication of two widely adopted and often contradictory lists of North American birds—by Robert Ridgway in 1880 and Elliott Coues in 1882—engendered increasing nomenclatural chaos that threatened to rend the American ornithological community into two opposing camps.³³ Since both lists commanded loyal followings and neither author was willing to concede to the other, some kind of compromise was needed to break the impasse.

A hint at one possible solution to the dilemma came in the January 1883 issue of the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club. In a typically clever and whimsical piece, Coues indicated that several birds had recently visited him and offered their congratulations at the completion of seven volumes of the Bulletin. One of his feathered visitors, a sagacious hawk owl, then brought up the subject of “late catalogues and nomenclators of North American Birds” and suggested “calling a Congress of American Ornithologists to discuss, vote upon, and decide each case in which the doctors disagreed ... the congressmen to bind themselves to the decision of the majority. The plan seemed to him ... the only way to secure the greatly desired uniformity of nomenclature.”³⁴

Shortly after this publication appeared, Coues, Allen, and Brewster began preliminary discussions about organizing a national society of ornithologists. Those tentative talks quickly turned more serious when the editor of a western paper responded to Coues’s hint in the January Bulletin with his own call for a national association. Coues feared that the idea was now “in the air,” and that he, Brewster, and Allen should be prepared to act quickly to keep the organization under their control: “There is no knowing how soon we may need to move with silence, sagacity and celerity to shape it as we want it. It must not be taken away from Cambridge, nor out of our hands. . . . We have got to be alive, and shoot the thing on the wing, or it will fly by into some other game-bag.”³⁵

In a series of exchanges over the next several months, Coues, Brewster, and Allen hashed out the details for the inaugural meeting and basic structure of the AOU. The question of how best to announce the meeting was one of the first and most crucial. Initially Coues favored publication of an open invitation in the July issue of the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club.³⁶ By early June, Allen and Brewster had convinced him that private invitations mailed to a select few were preferable to keep out “aspirants for unearned glory,” to give the call “a social and personal weight which no promiscuous publication could,” and “to make it something of an honor to be a member.”³⁷ As a compromise, Coues suggested a published notice in the July Bulletin announcing that invitations had been (or would be soon) issued. This would provide “all the desirable publicity to the movement, and yet keep the call itself as privately in hand as we think proper.”³⁸

The next problem was deciding who to invite. Cones, Brewster, and Allen used several criteria to generate the final invitation list of forty-eight names. From early in the process, all three founders agreed on a policy of “keeping active membership small and select... to make it something of an honor and to keep it working smoothly.” Coues suggested they formulate “some definite theory of who are eligible and who are not” to head off criticism of the final invitation list and to reduce the temptation to increase its size to maximize income for the young organization. He also proposed publication of “recognized works of good repute” as “theoretical gauge” for determining whether to issue an invitation to a particular individual.³⁹

Although the AOU was ostensibly a scientific organization, scientific reputation was only one of several factors that had a bearing on whether an individual received an invitation to its founding meeting. Coues argued that to avoid the “slightest appearance of cliquism or sectionalism” the invitations should be “as catholic as possible, geographically speaking. The western names are well, for this if for no other reason.” Besides, those at a great distance were unlikely to make the lengthy trip to New York anyway.⁴⁰ He also thought it appropriate to include the well-to-do who might lend prestige and funds to the organization. For example, Coues suggested invitations be sent to George B. Sennett, “a first rate fellow, moneyed, who would be pleased I am sure”; to Henry D. Minot, who had good “relations”; and to George Bird Grinnell, the wealthy editor of Forest and Stream.⁴¹

By early August plans were sufficiently advanced to justify issuing a formal call for the organizational meeting of the AOU. According to the printed invitation, the purpose of the society was the “promotion of social and scientific intercourse between American ornithologists” and “the advancement of Ornithology in North America.”⁴² Beyond these broad goals, a “special object” was the adoption of a “uniform system of classification and nomenclature, based on the views of the majority of the Union, and carrying the authority of the Union.” Allen, Coues, and Brewster signed the invitation and appended their affiliation with the Nuttall Ornithological Club to each of their respective names.

Twenty-three ornithologists attended the three-day organizational meeting of the AOU convened at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on 26 September 1883.⁴³ Neither Baird, who had previously sent his regrets, nor Allen, who was ill, could make the trip. However, both gave their blessings to the fledgling organization, and, like all those in attendance at the inaugural meeting, both were declared founding members.⁴⁴ With a detailed agenda in hand, Brewster called the first session to order, only to be upstaged when his cofounder Coues was elected acting chair.⁴⁵ After that rocky start, things went pretty much as planned. Following a lengthy discussion the assembled ornithologists passed Allen, Coues, and Brewster’s provisional constitution and bylaws. These documents created four classes of membership: active (limited to fifty), foreign (non-U.S. or Canadian, limited to twenty-five), corresponding (U.S., Canadian, and foreign, limited to one hundred), and associate (U.S. and Canadian, unlimited in number).⁴⁶ Of these four classes, only active members could vote, hold office, and nominate new members. But even they were not complete equals. The true seat of power of the union was its council, initially composed of the president, two vice-presidents, a secretary-treasurer, and five elected councilors.

On the second day of the meeting, acting chair Coues created six committees and appointed members for each.⁴⁷ At the time of the meeting, systematics formed the core activity of scientific ornithology, and discrepancies between the two competing lists of North American birds had been a major reason for founding the AOU. As a result, the Committee on the Classification and Nomenclature of North American Birds was the most active, influential, and enduring committee in the organization. As one indication of its importance, all three founders, along with Ridgway and Henshaw, served on the initial nomenclature committee.

Coues also appointed five other, shorter-lived committees at the first AOU meeting. Thirteen members joined the Committee on Migration of Birds, chaired by C. Hart Merriam. Several AOU members also agreed to serve on a committee charged with considering the subject of “Faunal Areas.” Under Merriam’s leadership these two committees were soon merged during a campaign to expand professional opportunity in and obtain government patronage for ornithology. Two minor committees, on Avian Anatomy and Oology, soon disbanded due to inactivity. The final committee, on the “eligibility or ineligibility of the European House Sparrow in America,” met for two years before issuing a brief final report condemning efforts to introduce the bird in the United States.⁴⁸

As Coues had urged from the earliest deliberations, the most important step in the formation of the AOU was securing a suitable publication.⁴⁹ The three founders decided to keep the issue under wraps at the organizational meeting, lest it slip from their control. Rather, as was to be typical of most important issues for the new society, the publication issue was raised in a council meeting on the evening of 28 September 1883. There Brewster claimed that as president of the Nuttall Ornithological Club “he was authorized to say, though he could not do so officially,” that the club was willing to offer the “prestige and subscription list” of its publication to the union if the resulting publication was presented to the public as a second series of the Bulletin. The council accepted Brewster’s curiously “authorized” but “unofficial” offer and voted to begin publication of the AOU journal under Alien’s editorship in January 1884.⁵⁰ At a special meeting held in December, the council named the new periodical The Auk.⁵¹ The name, like that of the union itself, was modeled on the British Ornithologists’ Union, whose publication was entitled The Ibis.⁵² The council also appointed four associate editors: Coues, Ridgway, Brewster, and Montague Chamberlain, a bookkeeper and later partner in a large wholesale grocery firm in St. John, New Brunswick.⁵³

Thus within several months of its inaugural meeting, the AOU assumed the basic structure it would maintain for the next fifty years. Unlike its predecessor, the relatively heterogeneous and egalitarian Nuttall Ornithological Club, it was to be a strongly hierarchical organization controlled by a few “active” members. While the organization struggled to deal with this potentially divisive issue, it also sought to take other measures to consolidate the discipline of ornithology and expand professional space in the field. As AOU leaders grappled with these and other challenges, they tried to strike a balance between their desire to erect clear boundaries between themselves and the larger ornithological community and their need to maintain continued contact with the group upon which they depended for specimens, funds, legitimacy, and a supply of future ornithologists.

‘‘AMATEURS” AND THE AOU

The public announcement that invitations to the founding meeting were in the mail led to widespread confusion and complaint.54 When a furious Joseph M. Wade, the editor and owner of the Ornithologist and Oologist (fig. 9), protested to Merriam about not being invited to the AOU organizational meeting, Merriam fired off a letter to Brewster.⁵⁵ According to Merriam, Wade learned of the initiative through the notice in Forest and Stream and regarded his failure to receive a personal invitation as “a direct snub.”⁵⁶ Most apparently assumed, as Merriam had, that “amateurs would make up the bulk of the members” in the new society.⁵⁷

Unlike most of those who failed to receive an invitation or gain election to active membership in the new society, Wade possessed the means to respond publicly. In a sarcastic editorial written for the November 1883 issue of the Ornithologist and Oologist, Wade attacked the new organization and its predecessor, the Nuttall Ornithological Club. According to Wade, the Nuttall Club had been “too much of the Pharisee order” in ignoring the more humble collector, “ ‘the bone and sinew’ of our beautiful science.” To add insult to injury, the organization had long claimed that its Bulletin was the “only” ornithological periodical in the country when it had not begun publication until a full year after the Oologist, the predecessor of Wade’s Ornithologist and Oologist. But it was the invitation-only inaugural gathering of the AOU that was the main object of Wade’s ire: “A meeting of the most exclusive kind has been recently held in New York. And this convention of scientists have named their new society ‘The American Ornithological [sic] Union.’ The mistake is, it is not American, and it is formed too much on the principle of our city social clubs where each member carries a Yale key. It won’t work in science, gentlemen; all nature belongs to all men.”⁵⁸

Wade continued by ridiculing scientific ornithologists’ preoccupation with nomenclatural issues: “You sadly mistake the importance of the mission. It matters little what you call him, the Blue Jay screams just as loud for rich and poor, for boy and man alike. It is a mystery to us why the names of our birds should be such a bone of contention. It always reminds us of a lawyer discovering during a trial a nice point of law and forgetting that he has a client to look after.”⁵⁹ He then ran through a list of members of the new organization, providing commentary on who had and had not been invited to the founding meeting. Among those unjustly excluded were “the editor of this paper” and the taxidermist, dealer, and author C. J. Maynard, who was “studying bird life when many of the present members [of the AOU] were toddling around in petticoats.”

For reasons that remain unclear, Wade’s outburst never saw the light of day. John Hall Sage, who was elected an active AOU member at the first meeting and later served as secretary of the organization for nearly three decades, learned of the attack before its actual publication. Somehow he convinced Wade to suppress it. Wade delayed mailing the November issue of the Ornithologist and Oologist to give him time to replace his editorial with a more benign article.⁶⁰

Figure 9. Cover of the Ornithologist and Oologist, 1884. Until its demise in 1893, the collecting-oriented O and O provided a forum for regular criticism of the AOU and scientific ornithology more generally.

Despite his decision not to publish his caustic editorial, Wade remained at odds with the newly founded organization. In a letter written after the first meeting, Chamberlain informed Brewster of rumors that several of those excluded from the original AOU were “preparing for the war path” against the new organization. According to Chamberlain, “Maynard or Minot, or perhaps the pair in a team with Wade,” intended to start a new periodical “in opposition to the A.O.U.,” a periodical that would likely be a “continuation of the O[rnithologist] and O[ologist].”61

Brewster passed Chamberlain’s letter on to J. A. Allen with the suggestion that its author be named an associate editor of the yet unnamed AOU publication. According to Brewster, Chamberlain was a “staunch, high minded gentleman of unusual ability and intelligence” who had the potential to develop into a “wise and effective sub-leader.” He would surely prove a valuable ally in the event that the movement against the AOU continued to grow: “If there is going to be a fight we cannot be too strong.”⁶²

In his next letter, Chamberlain announced that he had been “harmonizing away at Wade and Maynard,” trying to convince “the soreheads” that the AOU was only desirous of doing what was best for itself and “ornithology at large.” Chamberlain also revealed he had “made Wade a straight offer for the O & O” and that he would “outbid the others to keep them from making it an anti-Union organ,” but he was pessimistic regarding his chances for success.⁶³ Within three weeks Chamberlain was writing to Brewster that “I entirely concur in your opinion that it is both useless and unnecessary to make any further efforts at conciliating the ‘soreheads’—we may have to fight. . . . They made no small effort at raising discord in the ranks of the A.O.U. & will keep on at it—and will not stop trying unless they are gagged.”⁶⁴

AOU founders attempted to incorporate the larger ornithological constituency of taxidermists, dealers, and collectors—which they had barred from active membership in the new society—into a second tier of associate members. The AOU Council presented its first nominating list of associate members on the third day of the inaugural meeting. According to Merriam, the secretary-treasurer of the union, the final list of eighty candidates had been selected “with great care” from among three hundred proposed names. Those singled out represented “a most important—indeed, vital—element, consisting as they do of the amateur working ornithologists of North America, the men from among whom future candidates for Active Membership must be selected.”⁶⁵ Since only a handful of the active members of the AOU actually made a living through the practice of ornithology, clearly Merriam was using the term “amateur” to denote a level of commitment to and/or expertise in scientific ornithology, not as a statement about occupational status. Among the initial list of associate members was a broad spectrum of bird enthusiasts, including the nature writers John Burroughs and Bradford Torrey; the dealer-taxidermists Manly Hardy, Fred T. Jencks, and C. J. Maynard; and the magazine publisher Joseph M. Wade.⁶⁶

The night after the election of the first slate of associate members, the AOU Council met to firm up plans for its proposed publication. The question of how to allow for the interests of the large number of “amateurs” again arose. During the proceedings, Merriam and Chamberlain consistently advocated the need to recognize

the existence, power and importance of the large amateur element in American Ornithological Science[,] for this element comprises the great bulk of working field collectors and observers throughout the land. These enthusiastic field naturalists are the men who gather the greater part of the material, in the way of specimens and facts, upon examination and exploration of which the progress of Ornithology in this country largely depends.⁶⁷

Both ornithologists suggested that the “younger and less experienced portion of this class” required “an organ less technical in character than the Ibis, or even the Bulletin of the Nuttall Club.” Council members then discussed whether the AOU could best serve this need by establishing a separate “amateur publication” or “an amateur department” in its regular serial publication. In the end the council left the decision to J. A. Allen, the newly elected editor of the Auk, in consultation with his panel of associate editors.

Their decision to aim the new periodical toward a more technically oriented audience remained one of several sources of tension between the smaller group of scientific ornithologists who created and controlled the AOU and the much larger group of associate members who provided the income needed to keep the organization and its periodical afloat. Although Allen included a more popular “Notes and News” section in the Auk, in part to cultivate a wider interest in the new journal, associate members repeatedly complained about being asked to support a periodical that was largely beyond their grasp.⁶⁸ Before the end of the first year of publication, Chamberlain was complaining to Merriam, “What are we to do with The Auk? It is not meeting the demand of the bulk of the students of ornithology—it is heavy with technicalities—devotes too much space to the science of bird skins and bird names and too little to bird[’]s lives.”⁶⁹

FORGING A PROFESSION I

Through its two-tiered membership policy, the AOU sought to differentiate between the more dedicated, capable, and technically oriented scientific ornithologist and the much larger community of variously motivated bird enthusiasts. At the same time, the emerging organization sought to expand the limited employment opportunities in the field of ornithology. Historian Marianne G. Ainley has recently noted that when the AOU was founded in 1883, only five of the organization’s twenty-five original members—Allen, Baird, Coues, Henshaw, and Ridgway—made a living from the practice of science. Only two of these five—Allen and Ridgway—were employed primarily as ornithologists.70

The first major campaign to carve out professional space in ornithology was an outgrowth of the Committee on Migration of Birds. The chair of the committee, C. Hart Merriam, was one of the few AOU founders with any formal training in natural history.⁷¹ Raised on a farm in rural Locust Grove, New York, where his father had retired from a successful brokerage and banking career at a young age, Merriam had ample opportunity to pursue his interest in collecting birds and mammals. His parents encouraged his interest, and when Merriam’s father was elected to Congress in 1871. he took his sixteen-year-old son to Washington to meet Spencer F. Baird at the Smithsonian Institution. Impressed by the promise exhibited in Merriam’s bird and mammal skins, Baird suggested that the boy take taxidermy lessons to refine his techniques. Merriam spent the next several months at John Wallace’s taxidermy establishment in New York City before Baird arranged for him to accompany Ferdinand Hayden’s expedition into northwestern Wyoming in the spring of 1872.⁷² In the fall of 1873 Merriam enrolled in Williston Seminary, Easthampton, Massachusetts, to prepare himself for the entrance examinations at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School. Following a year at Williston Seminary and three years at Yale, Merriam entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. While in medical school he roomed with two of his fellow students, A. K. Fisher and Edgar A. Mearns, who were also naturalists and later founding members of the AOU. After Merriam received his M.D. degree in 1879, he returned home to Locust Grove to begin a successful medical practice.⁷³

Like many other physicians, Merriam found that his rural medical practice allowed him ample opportunity to pursue his interest in natural history.⁷⁴ During the next several years he managed to establish a reputation as one of the most accomplished ornithologists and mammalogists in the United States. One measure of his standing among his colleagues was his election as secretary-treasurer of the AOU at its founding meeting in 1883.⁷⁵

Merriam also became the first chair of the AOU Committee on Migration, a duty he undertook with characteristic intensity. He immediately prepared a four-page circular that detailed the proposed work of the committee and provided instructions for potential “collaborators.”⁷⁶ The goal of the ambitious study was not only to discover the average dates of arrival at and departure from various locations for several common and easily recognizable migratory species, but also to collect data to learn “the causes which influence the progress of migration from season to season.”⁷⁷ Merriam sought the active “co-operation of every ornithologist, field-collector, sportsman, and observer of nature in North America” for the project. He made it clear that he considered a “large corps of observers” as “absolutely essential to the success of the undertaking.”⁷⁸

Merriam requested each of his volunteer observers to prepare a list of the birds found in their area, to indicate whether those species were permanent residents or migrants, to estimate their relative abundance, and to provide dates of the first appearance, arrival and departure of the bulk, and departure of last individual specimen seen for each migratory species. This information, along with observations of a series of meteorological and “correlative” phenomena (e.g., the date of flowering of various plants), was to be forwarded to one of thirteen district supervisors, who in turn was to pass it on to Merriam. The chair was then to “arrange, condense, and systematize” the data and present it to the union with his “comments, deductions or generalizations.” In short, the basic structure of the committee was similar to the collecting networks that had long been characteristic of ornithological research in the United States.

To secure as many observers as possible, Merriam mailed his bird migration circular to eight hundred newspapers across the country. As a result of the publicity generated, some three thousand individuals requested additional information on the venture, and nearly seven hundred volunteers actually turned in observations to their district superintendents by the end of the first year. In addition, Merriam distributed twelve hundred sets of schedules and circulars to lighthouse keepers in the United States and Canada, from whom he received nearly three hundred additional returns. In his annual report to the AOU in 1884, Merriam indicated that the number of returns was so “exceedingly voluminous” that it was “utterly impossible to elaborate on them without considerable pecuniary aid.”⁷⁹

It is not clear exactly when Merriam first thought of approaching the federal government to provide that aid. The general idea of government support for scientific research certainly was not new to him: he had served as a naturalist on the federally funded Hayden Survey as a teenager and several years later had tried (unsuccessfully) to get state officials to sponsor an ornithological survey of New York.⁸⁰ But Merriam’s decision to seek federal support for the AOU migration committee’s work most likely was the immediate result of a recent meeting of the First International Ornithological Congress in Vienna, which had occurred the preceding April. At its inaugural meeting the International Congress had created a Committee on Migration of Birds, which requested delegates from each of the participating countries to appeal for governmental support to organize and maintain “migration stations” and to “publish annual reports of the observations made.”⁸¹

At Merriam’s urging, members attending the annual AOU meeting in 1884 passed a motion authorizing the council to petition the U.S. Congress and the Parliament of Canada “in behalf of the Committee on Migration.”⁸² N. S. Goss, an active member from Kansas, then convinced the AOU to merge the Committee on Bird Migration with the Committee on Geographical Distribution of Species (originally named the Committee on Faunal Areas).⁸³ At a special meeting later that evening, the AOU Council voted to ask Congress to create a Division of Economic Ornithology within the Department of Agriculture and appointed Merriam to draw up a suitable document relaying that request.⁸⁴

In proposing a federal Division of Economic Ornithology, the AOU was hoping to gain federal support for a nearly three-decade-long research tradition in applied ornithology.⁸⁵ Beginning in the 1850s a number of American ornithologists had begun systematic investigation into the food habits of birds in an effort to delineate their relationship to agricultural production. Based on field observations and an analysis of the stomach contents of the species under investigation, economic ornithologists categorized birds as beneficial, and thereby deserving of special protection, or injurious, and thereby deserving of persecution. State natural history surveys and agricultural boards were major sponsors of these early economic studies, and in the eyes of Merriam and the AOU, federal support was the next logical step.

If the AOU funding request was to have any chance of success before a hardnosed Democratic Congress, Merriam recognized it would have to stress the practical benefits of the committee’s work. His funding proposal emphasized the large quantity and “great value” of the data thus far gathered through his large network of observers.⁸⁶ Only with government aid could this extensive data—which was not only of obvious “scientific interest,” but also important for “practical agriculturalists”—be properly analyzed and publicized.⁸⁷ In Merriam’s optimistic estimate, “the farmers of the United States would profit to the extent of many thousands of dollars per annum by availing themselves of the results of these inquiries.”⁸⁸

Merriam finished drafting the AOU petition, arranged for it to be signed by the AOU Council, and presented it to Congress in January 1885. Rep. William H. Hatch from Missouri, chair of the House Agricultural Committee, and Sen. Warner Miller of New York, an old Merriam family friend and chair of the Senate Agricultural Committee, placed copies of the document before their respective chambers for consideration.⁸⁹ Merriam and Baird testified for the proposal during House Agricultural Committee hearings held later that month, and the full House quickly approved the creation of a small Division of Economic Ornithology within the United States Department of Agriculture’s larger Division of Entomology.⁹⁰ The House version of the Agricultural Appropriation Bill creating the new office failed to increase the funding for the Division of Entomology, which understandably alarmed C. V. Riley, the agency’s chief. Riley wrote to Sen. Miller expressing support for the AOU proposal and concern at the lack of appropriations for the new agency.⁹¹ Miller convinced the Senate to give $10,000 for the new division, but the appropriation was reduced to $5,000 during Conference Committee negotiations.⁹² Although modest, the allocation was enough to hire two full-time naturalists to staff the agency.

After the Division of Economic Ornithology was authorized and funded, the next task was locating someone suitable to head it. In a curious letter to J. A. Allen, Merriam indicated that he had the “liveliest interest” in the work of the AOU migration committee but did not want the position if the request for government funds were successful.⁹³ Soon after Congress approved the $5,000 appropriation, Riley informed Allen that Coues was lobbying to get himself appointed. Riley said that he had cabled Merriam, who was abroad for several months, to find out his intentions and assured the AOU president that he would be guided by the wishes of the union.⁹⁴ At this point Merriam cabled back that he would accept the position if it was offered to him, but only if he could direct the agency’s work as he saw fit.⁹⁵ At a special council meeting convened after Merriam’s return in mid-April, Allen announced that the commissioner of agriculture wanted the AOU to nominate someone to take charge of the new division. Much to the chagrin of Coues, the council unanimously chose Merriam as its nominee.⁹⁶ He assumed the new post on 1 July 1885 and immediately hired his old friend and fellow ornithologist A. K. Fisher as his assistant.

Despite this small beginning, Merriam’s agency soon grew in size and scope. After lobbying the appropriate members of Congress, in 1886 Merriam arranged to have his organization divorced from Riley’s Division of Entomology, to double its appropriation to $10,000, and to expand its investigations to mammals and birds.⁹⁷ The new Division of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy continued to undertake food habit, migration, and geographical distribution studies and also took over the large body of material gathered by the defunct AOU Committee on the English Sparrow.⁹⁸ Over the next decade the division gradually came to focus on investigations of the distributions of birds and mammals, a shift in orientation recognized by an official name change to the Division of the Biological Survey in 1896^{. 99} Congress continued to increase the young agency’s budget until it soon became a major employer of ornithologists and mammalogists in the United States and the linchpin in the federal government’s burgeoning wildlife program.

FORGING A PROFESSION II

In 1884, the same year that the AOU had first sought to increase employment opportunities in ornithology through federal patronage, it also contacted several large North American natural history museums in an effort to persuade them to hire qualified ornithological curators. The move was precipitated by a speech Philip Lutley Sclater delivered during the AOU’s second annual meeting in 1884. Sclater, secretary of the Zoological Society of London and joint editor of British Ornithologists’ Union’s Ibis, had first visited the United States in 1856 and brought back glowing reports on the nation’s ornithological collections.100 He returned to the United States nearly two decades later, soon after Elliott Coues had visited England in the winter of 1883-1884.¹⁰¹ No doubt it was Coues who invited Sclater, Howard Saunders, and several other British ornithologists to attend the second meeting of the AOU in 1884. While escorting the British contingent on a tour of several eastern cities, Coues probably suggested that Sclater speak to the union about the need for paid curators at American institutions.¹⁰²

In October 1884, on the second day of the annual meeting, AOU President J. A. Allen called for Sclater to address the assembled members. After apologizing for any offense that might result from his remarks, the prominent British ornithologist voiced extreme concern about “three large & valuable collections of birds [in the United States]” that were “not under the care of paid working ornithologists.” The extensive collections at the Boston Society of Natural History, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia each contained many type specimens upon which original published descriptions had been based, and yet in all three collections Sclater had seen firsthand evidence of neglect: insect damage, improperly labeled specimens, and poor arrangement.¹⁰³ Sclater argued that these institutions had an obligation to prevent “the loss or injury of such specimens” whose destruction would represent “a great & irreparable loss to science.” He called on the union to urge these institutions to take “immediate action in this matter.”¹⁰⁴

Although William Brewster defended the Boston Society of Natural History’s ornithological collection, for which he served as honorary curator, most AOU leaders welcomed Sclater’s plea as a possible means to expand professional opportunity in their field. The AOU Council took up the issue at its meeting on the day following Sclater’s address. After a motion by Merriam, the council voted to appoint Allen and Cones to a committee to “prepare memorials addressed to the Trustees” of the three institutions mentioned in Sclater’s speech. In their letter the two were to call attention to the condition of these collections and “recommend immediate employment, by said institutions, of competent paid curators.”¹⁰⁵

At the time of the AOU’s decision to approach the three institutions, the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard was experiencing a bout of severe financial distress. Louis Agassiz’s son, Alexander—a trained naturalist who had made a fortune as a mining engineer for the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company in Michigan—had personally bankrolled the institution since his father’s death in 1873.¹⁰⁶ But recently Alexander Agassiz had laid off several assistants and hinted to J. A. Allen, his longtime curator of birds and mammals, that he was finding it harder to keep him on the payroll.¹⁰⁷

Early in 1885 Allen received a job offer to become a curator of birds and mammals at the American Museum of Natural History, one of the three institutions singled out in Sclater’s speech and the AOU’s memorial campaign. Morris K. Jesup, a railroad broker who had been selected as museum president in 1881, was a capable administrator with a much more forceful vision of the museum’s mission than his two predecessors.¹⁰⁸ During his twenty-seven-year presidency, Jesup not only improved exhibits and public outreach programs, he also committed himself to making the museum a locus of scientific research and to hiring qualified staff to curate the expanding collections. It is unclear exactly what role the AOU’s efforts played in Jesup’s decision to hire Allen, but it seems more than a coincidence that the decision came immediately following the AOU’s campaign to expand professional opportunity in ornithology.

Upon his arrival in May 1885, Allen began building the AMNH bird and mammal department into a national center for scientific research.¹⁰⁹ His first task was to catalog the specimens under his charge, some thirteen hundred mammals and thirteen thousand birds, most of which were on exhibit. From the beginning Allen also pushed vigorously to expand the museum’s study collection.¹¹⁰ After two years of prodding, in 1887 museum officials finally authorized the purchase of the George N. Lawrence collection (twelve thousand bird skins), the Lawrence library (approximately a thousand volumes), and the Herbert H. Smith collection (four thousand skins). The same year Allen persuaded Edgar A. Mearns to donate his collection of Arizona birds (over two thousand specimens) and D. G. Elliot to present his collection of two thousand humming birds. Allen boasted that with these accessions, the AMNH bird collection “had suddenly been transformed from merely a show collection to one of impressive scientific importance.”¹¹¹

Over the next thirty-six years, Allen also recruited many able assistants, beginning with Frank M. Chapman in 1888, to help care for the bird collection. In 1908 Chapman was promoted to curator of birds, and in 1920 to chair of the newly created department of birds. At Alien’s and Chapman’s constant urging, museum officials hired many additional staff. By the 1930s the American Museum of Natural History had one of the strongest bird collections (nearly seven hundred thousand specimens) and largest and most-renowned curatorial staffs in the world.

THE SHUFELDT AFFAIR

While the AOU provided the institutional means to further the disciplinary and professional aspirations of scientific ornithologists, it was also a social organization. Like the more general scientific and learned societies established in Great Britain and the United States since the end of the seventeenth century, the AOU functioned simultaneously as a scientific institution and an exclusive gentlemen’s club (fig. 10).¹¹² These two aspects of the society were inseparable in the minds of most active members, for whom annual AOU conventions were as much an opportunity to establish and renew friendships as to transact the business of the organization or to keep up with current research in the field.

Except for occasional rumblings from those denied active membership in the organization, these scientific and social aspects of the AOU coexisted with relatively little tension throughout the organization’s early years. But as the nineteenth century drew to a close, a major scandal rocked the organization and forced it to examine its dual nature. The scandal, which unfolded in the years 1896 and 1897, involved a founding member of the union, Robert W. Shufeldt, and his recent wife, Florence Audubon, a granddaughter of the revered artist and naturalist John James Audubon. Charges that Shufeldt had committed adultery and then blackmailed his new wife in an attempt to thwart her effort to divorce him led to calls to expel the former army surgeon from the union. Many AOU members argued that despite his obvious scientific achievement, Shufeldt’s scandalous behavior was conduct unbecoming of a gentleman and hence disqualified him from further affiliation with the organization. The incident provoked such strong feelings among AOU members because it threatened to impugn not only the Audubon family name, but also that of the AOU itself. According to Coues, a close friend of the Audubons and leader of the campaign to oust Shufeldt, it was imperative to “purge the Union of such a pestilent member” who threatened the institution’s “peace and dignity,” if not its “actual existence.” Coues argued vigorously that “Shufeldt must go for the honor, dignity, and even safety of the A.O.U.”¹¹³

At the time of the scandal, Shufeldt was among the most accomplished scientific ornithologists in the country.¹¹⁴ The son of a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, he began collecting natural history specimens at a young age. A wealthy uncle presented him with the eight-volume octavo edition of Audubon, which further encouraged the youngster’s nascent interest in ornithology. After attending Cornell for three years and graduating from Columbian Medical College (later renamed George Washington University) in 1876, Shufeldt secured a position as an assistant-surgeon in the U.S. Army. He served lengthy tours of duty in several locations, including frontier Wyoming and New Mexico, before obtaining an early retirement in 1891 due to a heart ailment. At various times before and after retiring from activity duty he also served as a curator at the Army Medical Museum in Washington and an honorary curator of comparative morphology at the Smithsonian Institution. His initial scientific publication, on the bone structure of the burrowing owl (1881), was the first in a long series of technical works on the osteology, morphology, and paleontology of birds. He also authored popular articles and books on a variety of subjects. By 1924 he had an impressive fifteen hundred publications to his credit.

Figure 10. American Ornithologists’ Union group photograph, 1895. This photograph, taken at the AOU’s annual meeting in Washington, reveals the extent to which the organization was an almost exclusively male affair at the close of the nineteenth century.

Shufeldt first met the forty-two-year-old Florence Audubon in 1895, three years after his previous wife committed suicide in an insane asylum.115 After publishing a short biographical article on John James Audubon, he had received several letters from another of the famed naturalist’s granddaughters, Maria R. Audubon, who lived together with her sister, Florence, and their mother in Salem, New York.¹¹⁶ In October 1894 Maria Audubon and Shufeldt coauthored a short article on the last known portrait of Audubon.¹¹⁷ The collaboration soon led to a close friendship between Shufeldt and the two Audubon sisters. In September 1895, one month after they first met, Shufeldt and Florence Audubon were married.

Unfortunately, marital problems immediately befell the Shufeldt household in Takoma Park, Maryland. Versions of exactly what led to the couple’s breakup vary, but within two months of the marriage, Florence Audubon Shufeldt had fled back to her mother’s house in New York.¹¹⁸ She claims that when she attempted to file for divorce, her husband blackmailed her by threatening to publish a particularly graphic account of impotency in women if she continued with the proceedings.¹¹⁹ Although couched in terms of an objective scientific discussion, to anyone familiar with the couple it was clear that the main target of Shufeldt’s generally misogynistic outburst was his second wife.¹²⁰ Shufeldt claimed that his previously unmarried wife—who had earlier been engaged for twelve years—came from an “extremely erotic family,” exhibited many “decided signs of melancholia,” was “fond of strong drink,” and prone to “self-abuse.”¹²¹ Florence Shufeldt argued that she sought a divorce because her husband was carrying on an open affair with his Norwegian housekeeper, Alfhild Dagny Lowum, who was twenty years his junior. During the divorce proceedings, several witnesses swore to have seen Shufeldt and Lowum in compromising situations before and after his marriage to Audubon.¹²²

News of the Shufeldt scandal shocked the American scientific community. When Smithsonian Secretary S. P. Langley discovered that Shufeldt had been circulating copies of his article on impotency in women stamped “Compliments of Dr. R. W. Shufeldt, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.,” he immediately wrote a letter condemning “such use of the name of the Institution” as “against his wishes” and in violation of the rules of the Smithsonian.¹²³ Shufeldt defended his article, which he claimed was “of a strictly scientific nature” and printed in the official journal of the Medico-Legal Society of New York City, “the most distinguished organization of its kind.” The two hundred reprints he had circulated elicited “the highest possible praise” from physicians and jurists across the nation.¹²⁴ Unconvinced, Smithsonian officials quietly dropped Shufeldt’s name from their list of affiliates in the fall of 1897.¹²⁵

Shufeldt’s quiet departure from the Smithsonian was in stark contrast to the situation in the AOU. As early as January 1897, a day after he received a copy of Shufeldt’s “libelous” article, Elliott Coues wrote William Brewster, the current president of the union, arguing that “we should be able to rid ourselves of a person who is a disgrace to humanity.”¹²⁶ Brewster indicated that after obtaining the consent of the Audubon family to pursue the matter, the next step was for someone to formally charge “Dr. Shufeldt with conduct which shows him to be an improper person to be connected with the Union.”¹²⁷ As Brewster pointed out, AOU bylaws permitted expulsion of any member “by a two-thirds vote of the Active Members present at a stated meeting, three months’ previous notice of such proposed action having been given by the Secretary to all Active Members, and to the member accused.”¹²⁸

Coues then wrote Allen, Merriam, and other AOU leaders informing them of Shufeldt’s misconduct and asking for their counsel on how to proceed.¹²⁹ All expressed indignation at Shufeldt’s behavior.¹³⁰ However, several of those canvassed also expressed deep reservations about initiating formal expulsion proceedings. For example, D. G. Elliot recommended pushing for Shufeldt’s resignation for fear that if the AOU tried to expel him, the society might be drawn into an embarrassing lawsuit with uncertain results. Elliot considered it “doubtful” that “a Court or Jury would regard this accusation as regards his fitness to be a member of a scientific society, the test of which is scientific ability by published works and not by social ethics.”¹³¹ After consulting with an attorney about the legality of the AOU expelling one of its members, in late June 1897 Coues and Merriam mailed formal charges against Shufeldt to AOU Secretary John Sage.¹³² At the suggestion of Judge Charles Almy, a personal friend of Brewster, the specific wording of the charge was changed from “conduct unbecoming of a gentlemen” to “he is an improper person to be connected with the A.O.U.”¹³³

With the support of key AOU leaders, Sage mailed a printed circular to all active members that specified the charges against Shufeldt and announced that expulsion proceedings were to take place at the next AOU meeting in early November.¹³⁴ Sage’s circular prompted Shufeldt to file a set of countercharges in which he claimed that his two chief accusers—Coues and Merriam—had themselves engaged in “conduct unbecoming of a gentleman, in being party to a scheme to create a public scandal.”¹³⁵ According to Shufeldt, the two were motivated solely by “personal animosity,” and they had engaged in “making false statements of the grossest possible character” in their campaign to discredit him.¹³⁶

In the months leading up to the annual meeting, several AOU leaders questioned the wisdom of trying to force Shufeldt from the organization, while others devised strategies for carrying the expulsion to completion. Coues continued to argue that the AOU should serve as a “court of honor” to decide whether Shufeldt was “an improper person to be connected with the Union.”¹³⁷ Allen indicated that several members with whom he was in contact thought “it was a mistake to take up the matter at all, & that the best way out of the case would be to drop it by considering the charges as not properly subject to the action of the Union.” For many there was a lingering doubt about the necessity of “washing of much foul linen” in public and even whether the AOU, as a scientific organization, had jurisdiction in the case. Those who doubted whether the society should take up the expulsion issue continued to argue that “the Union is not a social but a scientific body, & as such it is doubtful how far the moral character of its members is open to consideration.”¹³⁸

In the end those with misgivings about bringing the case before the union prevailed. At the meeting on 8 November 1897, the ten assembled council members considered the case for hours. According to Coues, they were of “one opinion of the wretch, but exactly opposite as to the expediency of expelling him.” When it became impossible to reach a consensus on the issue of expulsion, the council and then the full membership passed a “hastily patched up resolution,” which stated that the charges were fully sustained by the evidence, but that the AOU had “no jurisdiction” in the case.¹³⁹

Had the matter ended there, the apparent message of the Shufeldt affair would have been that the AOU conceived itself primarily as a scientific organization only minimally concerned with the private lives of its members. But in a strange twist of events that betrayed the extent to which the notion of the AOU as a gentlemen’s club still prevailed, two days after the council decided it had no jurisdiction in the case, it unanimously passed a motion instructing the editor of the Auk to decline any articles Shufeldt might submit to the AOU’s official journal.¹⁴⁰ It is not clear that Allen, the editor during this period, ever enforced the resolution. In any case, it was not until 1909 that another article appeared in the Auk under Shufeldt’s name. But the fact that the council felt compelled to take punitive action against him itself was significant. The episode demonstrates that although the AOU was ostensibly a scientific organization, for some of its leaders, considerations of the moral conduct of its members remained important.

MEMBERSHIP REDUX

The AOU consciously pursued a different membership strategy from that adopted by many more exclusive, discipline-based scientific societies created in America during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Unlike societies that limited their membership to a narrow group of technically proficient, professional practitioners, from the beginning AOU leaders believed that recruiting and maintaining a large associate membership was critical to the well-being of their new organization.141

Several factors account for this more inclusive approach to institutionalization in ornithology. One of these was the continued heterogeneity of the North American ornithological community. As I have tried to show thus far, during the period surrounding the formation of the AOU, scientific ornithologists in the United States relied heavily on an extensive network of variously motivated individuals to provide the large series of specimens upon which their taxonomic and faunistic studies were based. Although this dependence on a broad spectrum of collectors, sport hunters, taxidermists, and natural history dealers was already beginning to diminish at the time of the creation of the AOU, in the absence of formal educational opportunities in field of ornithology, active AOU members continued to feel an obligation to the group from which the next generation of scientific ornithologists would eventually emerge. For example, in 1903 the editors of the Auk argued that the AOU was primarily “an association of professional ornithologists, or advanced workers in ornithology,” but that from the beginning its leaders had also sought to “secure the affiliation with all American bird students,—to bring amateurs into touch with the professionals, in the hope that their interest in bird study would thereby be fostered and their efforts be in a measure favorably guided by being brought into contact with the more experienced workers.”¹⁴² At the same time, a broad base of associate members provided legitimation and increased political support for ornithology and the AOU. And perhaps most importantly, associate members represented a crucial source of income for the organization: the $3.00 in dues they contributed each year provided the bulk of the funds needed to keep the Auk financially solvent.

Because of their previous experience with publishing the Bulletin of the Nuttall Ornithological Club, AOU founders had recognized the need to build a sufficiently large membership base to support the society’s ambitious publication program. In the early years of the organization, before attracting enough dues-paying associate members, the AOU issued frequent appeals to expand the periodical’s circulation to avoid increasing its price or decreasing its size and regularity.¹⁴³ As a printed letter that AOU Treasurer William Dutcher began circulating in 1898 reveals, the union made no secret that its need for funds to keep its periodical afloat fueled the desire to increase associate-level membership:

Figure 11. Membership in the American Ornithologists’ Union, 1883-1932. Compiled from Chapman and Palmer, eds., Fifty Years’ Progress of American Ornithology, 1883-1933 (1933).

It is imperative that there shall be a very substantial increase in the membership of the Society to enable it to meet its current expenses; practically all of the income received from membership fees and sales of publications are at once reinvested in publishing the “Auk.” ... If the Society’s membership list can be increased to a thousand names, its financial future can be assured.144

Figure 11 shows the extent to which periodic membership campaigns were successful in increasing the size of the union during its first fifty years. In 1900, two years after Dutcher issued his call for expanding the membership of the AOU, the number of active and associate members stood at 748. By 1910 the total AOU membership had grown modestly, to nearly 900. In 1920 over 1,142 ornithologists were affiliated with the organization. And by 1930, following aggressive campaigns that AOU Secretary T. S. Palmer and Treasurer W. L. McAtee spearheaded, nearly 2,000 individuals belonged to the AOU. This steady growth not only reflects the zeal with which AOU members worked to expand their organization, but also the role that the rise of birdwatching played in increasing public interest in ornithology throughout this period.¹⁴⁵

Of course, the AOU was not the sole beneficiary of the growth of interest in North American ornithology. In his sketch of the history of North American ornithology, Ernst Mayr has counted nearly twenty ornithological societies created between the years 1873 and 1893.¹⁴⁶ These local, state, and regional organizations brought together bird enthusiasts with a variety of motivations and levels of expertise. Among the most important of the local and state societies were the Linnaean Society of New York, founded in 1878 by C. Hart Merriam and former Nuttall members Ernest Ingersoll and Henry Balch Bailey, and the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club, founded in 1890 by several Philadelphia bird collectors.¹⁴⁷ The largest and most important regional ornithological societies were the midwestern-oriented Wilson Ornithological Club (founded in 1888) and the West Coast-oriented Cooper Ornithological Club (founded in 1893).¹⁴⁸ Both the organizations and the periodicals they initiated—the Wilson Bulletin and the Condor—remain active up to the present.

The success of these and other alternative ornithological societies in attracting members served both to diffuse and to promote criticism of the AOU. Many in these associations simply disregarded the AOU as a society with a largely eastern membership that almost invariably met in one of four East Coast cities and pursued an agenda with little relevance to their own interests.¹⁴⁹ But the new ornithological societies and their publications also provided a platform for venting criticism of AOU policies. This was especially true of Audubon societies and bird clubs that began to be organized near the end of the century and soon grew impatient with the continued collecting demands of scientific ornithologists.¹⁵⁰

At the same time, the growth of the AOU itself created pressure to modify its two-tiered membership structure. The AOU’s hierarchical membership policy limited the number of active members—those who actually controlled the organization—to fifty. This arbitrary limit, which represented an increasingly smaller percentage of the total membership, came under increasing attack as the nineteenth century came to a close.

Some criticism came from sources outside the AOU that had long been suspicious of the organization. The most prominent example was the collecting-oriented Ornithologist and Oologist, which regularly decried the AOU’s membership structure, nomenclatural practices, and bird protection activities until the periodical fell victim to the depression of 1893. For example, in 1891 the O & O, as it was often referred to by contemporaries, published a limerick revealing its attitude toward the AOU’s exclusive membership policy: “He was an aesthetic young fellow/ Who laughed in a tone very mellow,/ He joined the A.O.U.,/ With a tremendous ado,/ And now he is swell, swelled and sweller.”¹⁵¹ Three months later the periodical publicized the organizational meeting of a short-lived competitor to the AOU—the Association of American Ornithologists—which met at the taxidermy studio of F. S. Webster.¹⁵² That same year one of the periodical’s contributors complained of the “widening . . . gulf between an innumerable multitude of intelligent field workers and the select, exclusive circle of the ornithological union.”¹⁵³

Regular criticism also came from western ornithologists, especially members of the Cooper Ornithological Club, who argued that the AOU had failed to recognize the high level of scientific achievement several its members had reached. In May 1900 Frank S. Daggett of Pasadena, California, complained of the continued absence of western names among the roles of active membership in the AOU:

Up to the present time the A.O.U. has maintained a policy of seclusion by adhering arbitrarily to a rule that limits its active list to fifty members, to the exclusion of many worthy workers, and I find a strong sentiment exists that this policy be changed. Right here it might be well to mention some of the many reasons why the West, (and by that I mean all that section of the country not under the direct inspection of the Eastern scientific centers) should be more fully recognized in that body. The one most often put forward is the fact that interest, instead of being confined to a little coterie in the East, has spread all over the country until every state has its workers; not mere dabblers and “bird skinners,” but active, intelligent workers who are covering their respective fields with credit.¹⁵⁴

Daggett called special attention to the life history studies of the Cooper Ornithological Club, which he claimed were just as important and rigorous as the taxonomic studies that “gave [a] reputation to the founders of the A.O.U.” Moreover, Daggett noted the low turnover rate among so-called active members, many of whom were now aged and inactive, but still unwilling to give up their coveted positions to the next generation of ornithologists. To remedy the situation, he advocated expanding the number of active members to “60 or 75” and/or placing those who had ceased to make scientific contributions on a special honorary list to free up their space.

The more serious, technically oriented ornithologists in the West also resented being lumped together in a single membership category with the increasing number of associate members who joined the AOU largely to support its bird protection activities or because of their interest in recreational birdwatching. Cooper Club member Richard McGregor expressed his anger at being “placed in the same class with Audubonians and fad protectionists” who not only failed to appreciate the finer points of scientific ornithology, but also often opposed the collecting upon which much technical bird study was based.¹⁵⁵ In his editorial in the July-August 1900 edition of the Condor, McGregor suggested that the current list of associate members be divided into two categories to distinguish between “amateur ornithologists and the bird protectionists.” McGregor’s suggestion was quickly seconded and elaborated upon by AOU insider Frank Chapman, who proposed creating a class of more advanced “senior associates” limited to one hundred individuals.¹⁵⁶

In response to these and other suggestions, the ornithologists assembled at the AOU meeting for 1900 gave preliminary approval to several changes in the organization’s bylaws. These included: (1) an increase in the number of active members from fifty to seventy-five; (2) the creation of a new class of elective members, limited to seventy-five, which would be intermediate between associate members and active members; and (3) a change in the name of active members to fellows, and associate members to associates.¹⁵⁷ According to the notice in the Auk, there was “little doubt” that the amendments would be fully ratified at the next AOU meeting, in 1901. The proposed changes prompted a highly supportive editorial in the Condor, which noted that the move was met with “an indisputable feeling of satisfaction” by western ornithologists, who hoped to gain election to some of the new slots.¹⁵⁸

Women also hoped to benefit from the change in bylaws. Not until two years after its founding did the AOU finally elect its first female associate member, Florence Merriam (whose name had been placed into nomination by her well-connected brother, C. Hart Merriam).¹⁵⁹ As was then the case with most other scientific societies in the United States, however, Merriam and subsequent female members remained restricted to a “visibly subordinate level” within the AOU.¹⁶⁰ Even so, they continued to join, particularly when the organization became active in the Audubon movement during the closing years of the nineteenth century. By 1900 AOU membership rolls included the names of eighty female associate members (approximately 11 percent of all its members), but none had ever gained nomination for election to active membership in the male-dominated society.¹⁶¹ When the AOU gave its final approval to the new category of “elective members” in 1901, Florence Merriam Bailey, Mabel Osgood Wright, Olive Thorne Miller, and a few other women soon achieved the honor. However, the percentage of female elective members remained minimal before the 1960s (5 percent or below), and not until 1929 did the AOU elect Bailey as its first female “fellow.” Long after women began to make significant contributions to ornithology, they remained marginalized within the AOU.

The new category of elective members, created by a final vote at the 1901 meeting, helped mollify critics of the AOU, but the failure of the bid to increase the limit on the number of fellows during that same meeting left the door open for continued complaint. In 1908 John Lewis Childs, the proprietor of a large seed and plant business in Floral Park, Long Island, questioned what he believed was an arbitrary limit on the total number of fellows and elective members of the AOU.¹⁶² Childs was an avid collector who had amassed one of the largest private collections of North American eggs ever gathered. He also edited and published four volumes of his own periodical, The Warbler, between 1903 and 1913. There is little doubt that Childs would have been elected an active member at the time of the founding of the AOU. Yet, having joined the AOU as an associate in 1900, he had still failed to gain election to the new members class by 1906.

On the face of it, Childs’s criticism of the AOU membership policy seemed to echo the complaint made twenty-five years previously by Ornithologist and Oologist editor Joseph Wade: “It seems to me that this [limit] is unjust, unreasonable and un-American from every point of view.”¹⁶³ But Childs made it clear that he was not advocating an abolition of membership categories or standards. Rather, he believed that when an elective member reached a “certain standard” or level of competence (which he thought could be established by the “Board of Fellows”), they should automatically be granted fellowship in the AOU, no matter how many individuals were already occupying that category. As it now stood, there were several “Yellows’ whose work, whose renown or whose service to ornithology is far inferior to that of several ‘members’ who cannot be advanced to ‘fellows’ because that class is full.”¹⁶⁴ According to Childs, the same was true of associates hoping to become elective members, the position he had been in until resigning from the AOU in 1906.

In attempting to answer Childs’s objections, Auk editor Witmer Stone first admitted that there were some currently in the “class of Fellow” whose “services to ornithology” were “far inferior to those rendered by many in the class of Members.” But according to Stone, the situation was an artifact of history resulting from the “tremendous advancement” in ornithology since the AOU was organized twenty-five years previously. Stone rejected Childs’s scheme for abolishing the limits for each membership category to correct this injustice. Rather, he argued that “experience” had “long shown that a standard can be established and maintained only by declaring that certain classes of membership shall not exceed a certain number.” According to Stone, fifty was a “reasonable limit” for the number of fellows, “if this class is to have any significance.”

Seven years after the Childs-Stone exchange, Harold H. Bailey, a naval architect from Newport News, Virginia, son of a founding member of the AOU, and close friend of Childs, offered his own criticism of the membership policies of the AOU in several ornithological periodicals.¹⁶⁵ Bailey argued that there was widespread dissatisfaction with the membership structure of the AOU, which concentrated power and prestige in the hands of a few fellows. He pointed out that elective members (which comprised approximately 8 percent of the total AOU membership) and associates (which comprised 90 percent) each were required to pay yearly dues and yet had no “vote or voice” in the business matters of the organization. Rather, important decisions were typically made by a small number of fellows in “star chamber” business meetings, which remained closed to the “main supporters of the Union.”¹⁶⁶ Although he fell short of calling for complete abolition of the hierarchical membership structure, he seemed to have been moving firmly in that direction: “The current grades in the membership in the Union are unsatisfactory and undemocratic.”

Stone began his latest defense of AOU membership policy with the obvious comment that “election to any limited society or membership is bound to be unsatisfactory to some.” He reiterated his earlier point that it was impossible to establish a “definite standard” for each class of membership that would prevent the need for elections. Rather, he believed the only practical way to insure the high caliber of members was to make the difficult choice between candidates by election based on their relative merits. According to Stone, the enlargement of any particular class of membership would immediately debase the honor the election represented. As to allowing elective members and associates to become voting participants in the AOU, Stone argued that the organization had no desire to hide its actions and that there was “every probability of the adoption at the next meeting of a suggested plan whereby elective members will be allowed to share with the fellows the business management of the Union.”¹⁶⁷ The only reason this action had not been taken earlier, he argued disingenuously, was that AOU leaders wanted “to relieve the general membership of a burden” and allow the open sessions to be “devoted entirely to ornithological matters.”¹⁶⁸

In 1915 the AOU held its first regular meeting outside the East.¹⁶⁹ The fellows assembled in San Francisco voted unanimously to adopt an amendment to the AOU bylaws that allowed elective members to “share with Fellows the business of the Union and the election of Officers, Members, and Associates.”¹⁷⁰ However, this power sharing move did not go far enough for Bailey, who, as an associate member, was still denied voting rights in the AOU. He resigned in protest in December 1915.¹⁷¹

By the mid-1930s even Witmer Stone was beginning to express doubts about the continued wisdom of the restrictive membership policy. In a letter transmitting several proposed bylaw changes in 1935, Stone pointed out that he had “been very much impressed by the feeling, which is wide spread, that we should be organized more like the Mammal Society and get away from the ultra-conservative plan that seemed desirable at the time the A.O.U. was founded.”¹⁷² There was still a limit, however, to how far most AOU leaders were willing to go with their reform. At the 1936 meeting, elective members were finally granted the privilege of holding the offices of secretary, treasurer, and councilor.¹⁷³ But associates remained outside the circle of power. The boundaries that had been erected with the creation of the AOU remained in place fifty years later.

From its creation in 1883, the AOU provided an institutional focal point for the struggles between scientific ornithologists attempting to forge a discipline and a profession and the much broader ornithological community that was often unsympathetic to the aspirations of its more technically oriented colleagues. In an era when graduate degrees and professional opportunities were scarce, scientists supported a multitiered membership structure in their national disciplinary society as a means to encourage and reward scientific achievement. However, many of those excluded from the upper echelons of the AOU resented being asked to support an organization that seemed increasingly unresponsive to their own needs. As it turned out, the issue of AOU membership was only one of several concerns that came between scientists seeking to remake ornithology into a rigorous scientific discipline and the broader ornithological community upon which the scientists continued to depend.