CHAPTER EIGHT
Reforming American Ornithology
THE STATE OF THE UNION
In May 1930 Joseph Grinnell, president of the American Ornithologists’ Union, wrote to each of the other forty-seven fellows of the organization requesting “frank statements as to what. . . might be done to improve the effectiveness of the Union.” Grinnell had taken this unusual step, he said, because of recurrent “rumors of criticism” suggesting that the AOU was not as active as it had once been “with respect to scientific accomplishment, or to practical bird protection, or to general spread of sound scientific knowledge.” If replies to this informal survey revealed widespread discontent, he promised to use the powers of his office to “attempt to better the condition of the Union.”1
Although Grinnell tried to be upbeat in his letter, the general tone contrasted sharply with the rosy statistics presented in the official annual reports of the AOU. If numbers alone could tell the story, the organization appeared thriving, even as the nation was on the cusp of its deepest and darkest depression. As a result of aggressive recruiting efforts, membership had grown steadily and by 1930 was rapidly approaching the two thousand mark.2 The healthy increase in annual income provided by this influx of new members permitted an increase in the average number of pages printed in the Auk.3 Participation in annual meetings also was robust: more than two hundred members had attended and sixty papers had appeared on the program at the most recent gathering in Philadelphia, where Grinnell was elected president.4 While most ornithologists seemed to applaud this impressive growth, other more scientifically minded members were worried.
Twenty-seven fellows answered Grinnell’s request for their assessment of the state of the union.5 As might be expected, the general tenor of these responses ranged widely from “everything is fine” to “the Union is utterly failing in its mission.”6 One of the most critical replies came from Herbert Friedmann, a thirty-year-old curator of birds at the U.S. National Museum. Though more vocal than some of his colleagues, in many ways the letter’s author was typical of the younger generation of ornithologists, the first to receive extensive biological training and the first to earn graduate degrees in their field. Like several of his cohort, Friedmann feared that most AOU members were utterly lacking in scientific aspirations and that the organization itself failed to uphold appropriate scientific standards in the papers delivered at its annual meetings or in the reviews and articles printed in the Auk. His frustration flowed in his reply to Grinnell:
Since the AOU was “handicapped by a great host of rather uncritical, sentimental bird lovers,” Friedmann continued, its leaders needed to work harder “to inculcate higher standards” in the articles and reviews they published. The model for scientific rigor that he (and other reformers) repeatedly evoked was Erwin Stresemann’s Journal für Ornithologie, which Friedmann considered “far ahead” of the Auk.8 Although there was obviously a danger that adopting “more strictly scientific standards would cause a drop in the subscription list to the Auk,” he argued that in the end such a decline would be “worth while” and “no real loss.”
As one of the early Ph.D-trained ornithologists in the United States and founder of a pioneering graduate program in ornithology, Grinnell was clearly sympathetic to Friedmann’s complaints.9 To insure that his and other concerns gained a hearing, at the next annual meeting of the AOU (held in October 1930), he presented a presidential address based on the results of his survey. Grinnell reported that several of his colleagues were clearly uncomfortable with the continued growth of “a large class of amateurs” within the AOU “who will never become real scientists.”10 These associate members now held an overwhelming majority in the AOU, and because the organization relied on the annual dues they contributed, some believed that they had even gained control of the union itself, “at least indirectly.” One negative consequence of this large “amateur” presence was “too much genial tolerance of mediocrity” in the organization.
Grinnell then turned to a second issue that concerned him and several of his reform-minded colleagues. Over the years the AOU had allowed several important activities it had initiated to drift out of its control. As the wording of his initial query hinted, the specific example that Grinnell most had in mind was bird protection. Although the AOU had played a central role in creating the Audubon movement and nurturing it through its formative years, the organization had long since abandoned its leadership position in the movement. Grinnell was careful to quote a few AOU fellows who felt this break was entirely proper, but he also claimed that many others agreed with his assessment that the AOU bird protection committee ought to “become active” again and “do effective work independently of the Audubon Society.”11
Near the end of his address Grinnell suggested a possible “means toward offsetting the necessity of catering to our amateur clientele” while simultaneously reinvigorating the lethargic bird protection committee. What the AOU needed was a sufficiently large endowment fund “to insure publication of sound ornithology irrespective of subscriptions to the Auk” and “to pay the expenses of our working committees, so that these can convene oftener and therefore more effectively.”12 If a sufficient endowment were raised, the AOU might even begin providing grants to support scientific research in ornithology.
After delivering his address, Grinnell approached longtime Auk editor Witmer Stone about publishing it for wider distribution. He must have done so with some trepidation for he knew Stone was a strong advocate of cultivating “the interest and support” of the AOU’s large “amateur clientele.”13 In his reply to Grinnell’s original request for feedback, Stone had argued that his forty-year involvement with the AOU made him competent to deny “any foundation for such criticism as you get rumors of.” He admitted that because most of the financial support for the Auk came from associate members, it was important not to pitch “the journal entirely over their heads.” However, Stone denied that his ongoing efforts to keep the Auk accessible had in any way “lessened its scientific standing.”14
After speaking briefly with Stone, Grinnell provided him with a corrected copy of his speech and returned home to California with the clear expectation that it would appear in the next issue of the Auk.15 Not until over five months later did he finally learn that Stone had decided not to publish it. In an apologetic letter Stone claimed that after reading the address “several times,” he had developed “grave doubts about the advisability of publishing it.” Not only would its appearance provide ammunition for those who considered the AOU too much of a “highbrow” organization, but it would also thwart efforts to raise the very endowment that Grinnell considered crucial for reviving the organization. No one would want to donate funds for a group “in which there was dissention.”16
Although Stone attempted to suppress the embarrassing address, it nonetheless became the opening volley in a campaign to rejuvenate the hidebound AOU.17 At a time when the nation experimented with various initiatives to deal with the crisis of the Great Depression, the first generation of university-trained ornithologists in the United States struggled to reform the practice and institutional structure of their discipline. With aid from Ernst Mayr, a young, outspoken émigré who had recently arrived from Germany, reformers sought to shift the focus of ornithological research, to raise the standards by which that research was conducted and judged, and to instill the AOU with a stronger professional consciousness. Yet, despite their concerns about establishing more rigorous standards for ornithological research, most reformers still did not seek to exclude amateurs entirely from their discipline, even as they sought to forge it into a full-blown profession. Rather, scientific ornithologists continued to encourage the efforts of serious amateurs, as long as that research conformed to the scientists’ notions about what constituted legitimate ornithological practice.
GRADUATE TRAINING IN ORNITHOLOGY
Those who campaigned to overhaul the AOU in the 1930s shared a common educational background that fueled their enthusiasm for reform. Until the 1930s, scientific ornithologists in the United States had typically relied on self-education and apprenticeships to familiarize themselves with the set of practices and the body of knowledge associated with their field. Before then few avian researchers received formal training either in ornithology proper or biology more generally, and many of the most prominent ornithologists—like Robert Ridgway, Frank Chapman, and William Brewster—lacked college degrees of any sort, much less graduate degrees.
By the end of the nineteenth century formal advanced training was beginning to become available for most other scientific fields. Inspired by developments in Germany, American institutions of higher learning began experimenting with modern graduate programs in the early 1870s as part of a series of sweeping educational reforms.18 The innovation was slow to take hold, though, and by the time the AOU was founded in 1883, the total number of doctoral dissertations completed per year in the United States was still averaging below fifty while the number of science-related dissertations was half that figure. Then came a period of rapid expansion in graduate education in the years surrounding the turn of the century. By 1910 the Ph.D. degree had been elevated into “the standard credential for entry into a diverse array of academic and professional careers,” including careers in many (if not most) scientific disciplines.19
Initially ornithology proved a conspicuous exception to the general trend toward adopting higher education for training and certifying practitioners in scientific fields. Not until 1895 did Lynds Jones begin offering the first American undergraduate course in ornithology, and not until after the turn of the century was the first Ph.D. degree awarded in the field.20 By the early 1930s more than a hundred American universities were regularly offering at least some coursework in ornithology (typically as part of a broader class in zoology), and at least thirteen institutions allowed graduate students to specialize in the discipline. Yet, in a survey of AOU members taken in 1933, only 12 percent of the fellows, 24 percent of the members, and 27 percent of the associates reported any college-level training in ornithology. By that same year a total of fewer than thirty individuals had completed doctoral dissertations on ornithological topics.21
Not coincidentally, while graduate education was becoming the norm for serious researchers in most scientific fields, biological practice in the United States experienced a series of profound transformations. In the words of historian Jane Maienschein, the turn of the century represented “a pivotal time for biology” as “the sorts of papers produced, the organisms used, the questions asked and the problems attacked, the methods and approaches adopted—all changed in . . . important ways.”22 At academic institutions across the nation, proponents of a new, laboratory-based, and often more experimental biology began to challenge the more established field- and museum-oriented descriptive natural history tradition. Fresh from graduate programs here and abroad, advocates of the new biology struggled to forge new biological disciplines—like genetics, cytology, and experimental embryology. They also sought to expand the boundaries of traditional natural history practice, which had long been characterized by the collection, description, naming, and classification of organisms based largely on their external characteristics. In newly established field-oriented disciplines—like ecology and animal behavior—study of the living organism and its relationship with its environment began to receive serious attention for the first time.23
At some colleges and universities, the attempt to incorporate the new biology with the older natural history was like trying to mix oil and water. For example, well into the twentieth century the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ) remained a bastion for traditional natural history even as young, Ph.D.-trained, experimental scientists succeeded in creating a nationally recognized biology program at Harvard.24 Under the leadership of longtime Harvard President Charles Eliot and the biologist E. L. Mark—who received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig in 1877—the Harvard biological curriculum was increasingly reoriented toward the new laboratory-based disciplines of histology, cytology, embryology, and genetics. Although the MCZ remained the actual site of biological training at Harvard until the early 1930s, the museum’s curators and collections were increasingly divorced from that instruction, on both the undergraduate and graduate levels.
Ornithology was no exception to the intellectual and institutional inertia strongly in evidence at the MCZ.25 Until World War II MCZ curators focused primarily on building up their world-class bird collection, which by the early 1930s had grown to over 250,000 specimens, the third largest in the United States.26 They also continued to produce traditional taxonomic and faunistic publications based on those collections, including an ambitious, multivolume Checklist of the Birds of the World that James Peters began in the late 1920s.27 Although Thomas Barbour attempted to reintegrate the MCZ into Harvard’s thriving biological program soon after assuming directorship of the institution in 1927, his reform initiative achieved only limited success. Not until the 1950s did more than a handful of ornithologists receive graduate training at Harvard.28
Although it shared many connections with Harvard, the University of California at Berkeley, established in 1869, was more successful at integrating old and new approaches to biological research and training.29 The individuals most responsible for expanding Berkeley’s faculty and curriculum at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth were the marine zoologist William E. Ritter and the protozoologist Charles A. Kofoid, both of whom were products of Harvard’s Ph.D. program. Ritter initiated several new courses requiring laboratory work, founded the Scripps Institution of Biological Research, established postgraduate study in zoology at Berkeley, and headed the university’s Department of Zoology, which included four senior teaching staff by the time of his retirement in 1909.30 Three decades later, when Kofoid retired as chair of the department, the senior teaching staff had been expanded to eleven, and Berkeley had established a reputation as a premier center of academic biology in the United States.31
The individual most responsible for attracting ornithology students to Berkeley was Joseph Grinnell.32 Born in Indian Territory to a restless Quaker physician and his wife, Grinnell began collecting birds and mammals as a boy growing up on the frontier. After moving several times, the Grinnell family finally put down roots in Pasadena, California, where young Joseph graduated from Throop Polytechnic Institute (which later became CalTech). There, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, he also became associated with the Cooper Ornithological Club, whose periodical (the Condor) he was to edit for more than three decades. After earning his master’s degree at Stanford University in 1901, Grinnell began working toward his doctorate under David Starr Jordan before accepting a position as instructor in biology at his alma mater. That same year the twenty-four-year-old Grinnell was elected a fellow of the AOU, the youngest member ever to receive that honor. More than a decade later he finally completed his doctoral dissertation.33
Meanwhile Grinnell received the offer of a lifetime. In 1907 Annie M. Alexander—a dedicated, enthusiastic, and wealthy naturalist—recruited Grinnell to establish an ambitious new natural history museum she offered to fund. After negotiations to reconcile their differences, the two finally agreed that the new museum should be restricted primarily to the birds and mammals of California, oriented toward research, located on the Berkeley campus, and named the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ).34 Grinnell was delighted at the opportunity to head the new institution. The MVZ provided him with a permanent position, the specimens needed to conduct his research, as well as the opportunity to document the remnants of California’s unique fauna before they were completely lost to development.35 Concerned about raising the standards of natural history research, he immediately instituted a set of meticulous procedures for fieldwork, specimen documentation, and research presentation that became an MVZ hallmark.36 The abundant supply of specimens that he, his staff, and his large network of collectors gathered proved crucial as Grinnell developed some of the fundamental concepts in ecology—like the “niche” and “competitive exclusion”—as well as made important contributions to other areas of evolutionary biology, particularly the relationship among geographical distribution, climate, and physical environment (fig. 31).37 With Grinnell’s leadership and Alexander’s patronage, the MVZ quickly grew in size and stature.
After completing his Ph.D. degree in 1913, Grinnell also secured an appointment with the university’s Department of Zoology. For nearly four decades he offered regular undergraduate courses and advised a steady stream of mammalogy and ornithology graduate students. The Berkeley ornithology program really began to flourish in the early 1930s, when Alden H. Miller joined the MVZ and the Department of Zoology after earning his Ph.D. degree under Grinnell.38 By 1933 Grinnell and Miller were advising seven of the thirty-nine students at American universities who were writing dissertations on birds.39
During this period several other universities, such as Western Reserve and Michigan, also established active graduate programs in ornithology. Although both schools embraced the new biology just before the turn of the century, they also continued to promote more traditional approaches to natural history research. At Western Reserve the Ph.D.-trained zoologist Francis H. Herrick and the retired entrepreneur S. Prentiss Baldwin provided crucial leadership. Herrick, who gained appointment as the first head of the newly created Department of Biology in 1891, turned to bird study several years later, after long hours at the microscope began to take their toll on his eyesight.40 Soon he became widely acclaimed for his use of photography to document avian behavior. Although lacking in formal biological training, Baldwin pioneered the use of live traps to band birds in the 1910s, developed several new devices to monitor bird movements and metabolic rates, and established the Baldwin Research Laboratory in 1924, where he hired Western Reserve students to serve as his assistants.41 At Michigan, Alexander Ruthven—the herpetologist and longtime director of the Museum of Natural History—and (beginning in 1931) Josselyn Van Tyne—one of Ruthven’s numerous doctoral students—attracted a slow but steady stream of graduate students with a special interest in birds.42 By 1940 the Michigan program had produced eleven Ph.D.s who had written their dissertations on ornithological topics.43
Figure 31. Caricature of Joseph Grinnell, 1927. Part of a series drawn by E. R. Kalmbach for the annual AOU meeting, this cartoon lampoons Grinnell’s tendency to split off new subspecies of California birds and mammals.
By far the most productive site for graduate training in ornithology was Cornell University. From the time it opened its doors in 1868, the Department of Zoology was one of the institution’s strongest academic programs.44 The department began auspiciously when Louis Agassiz signed on as visiting professor of natural history and geology and secured permanent appointments for two of his most prized students. One of these, Burt G. Wilder, remained at Cornell for over four decades, where he became known as a tireless crusader and an important force in shaping the institution’s biological curriculum.45 Long before it became fashionable, Wilder insisted his students receive adequate laboratory instruction—even in large classes—and he was one of the first American educators to promote the idea of using the domestic cat as an introduction to vertebrate anatomy, much to the dismay of local humanitarians.46 Among Wilder’s many students were several renowned biologists recruited to join Cornell’s faculty, including the entomologist John H. Comstock, the histologist Simon H. Gage, and the ichthyologist (and later college president) David S. Jordan.47
Not until after the turn of the century, when Arthur A. Allen arrived in Ithaca, did Cornell establish its reputation as America’s most productive ornithological program. When Allen first came to Cornell as a freshman in 1904, he already had an extensive background in natural history.48 His father was an attorney and avid naturalist who strongly encouraged his children’s youthful interest in wildlife and the outdoors. After earning his bachelor’s (1907) and master’s (1908) degrees, Allen remained at Cornell to pursue his Ph.D. degree. He completed his dissertation, “The Red-winged Blackbird: A Study in the Ecology of the Cattail Marsh,” in 1911 and published it three years later to an enthusiastic reception.49 Based on stomach-content analyses and an extensive series of field observations, and illustrated with copious photographs, Alien’s life history of this ubiquitous species was delineated with unprecedented thoroughness. In a review for the Auk, Witmer Stone praised Allen’s monograph as “one of the best ecologic studies that has yet appeared,” while Frank Chapman called it “the best, most significant biography which has thus far been prepared for any American bird.”50
After completing his doctoral degree, Allen spent nearly a year in Colombia collecting birds for the American Museum of Natural History before returning to his alma mater to accept a position as instructor in zoology.51 In 1915 he gained promotion to assistant professor in ornithology and began building a graduate program in ornithology at Cornell.52 Both the specialized position and its associated program were the first of their kind in the nation.53 Sixteen years and many graduate students later, Allen, an accomplished bird photographer and public speaker, was promoted to full professor of ornithology. By 1933 he had supervised sixteen of the thirty doctoral degrees in ornithology earned in the United States up to that point, and twenty-one of the thirty-nine graduate students currently focusing on the subject were enrolled at Cornell.54 By the end of the decade Allen’s “Grad Lab” was churning out an average of more than four master’s and doctoral students per year.55 Among the ornithologists who graduated from the program before World War II were such luminaries as Ludlow Griscom, Herbert Friedmann, John Emlen, Peter Paul Kellogg, Olin S. Pettingill, Jr., and George M. Sutton.56
Whether pursued at Cornell or at any of the handful of other institutions that offered similar training by the 1930s, graduate education had many far-reaching implications for the structure and practice of ornithology in the United States. In terms of the content of the field, scientists with advanced degrees accelerated the process toward diversification in ornithological research that had already begun by the early twentieth century. Through mandatory and elective coursework, required reading lists, participation in colloquia, and interaction with faculty and other students, ornithologists who earned graduate degrees typically gained exposure to a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to biological research. No longer were specimen acquisition and microtaxonomy viewed as the only research agendas worth pursuing by serious avian researchers, as had generally been the case in the days when apprenticeships and self-education provided the most common paths to ornithological enlightenment. Gone too were many of the inhibitions about theorizing that most members of the earlier generation of American ornithologists shared.
At the same time that graduate education helped open avian research to new approaches, it also established a much clearer career trajectory for those who wanted to pursue ornithology as a vocation. For many years natural history museums and (to a lesser extent) state and federal agencies had provided the best employment prospects for the small number of ornithologists lucky enough to pursue ornithology as a vocation. While these institutions remained important employers, beginning in the 1930s and 1940s graduate-trained ornithologists gravitated toward positions in the rapidly expanding American university system.57 By providing systematic and rigorous training, a reliable form of certification, and reasonable job prospects, graduate education helped transform scientific ornithology into a full-blown profession.
ENTER ERNST MAYR
Although initially few in number, students fresh from newly established graduate programs represented an important force in the growing campaign to reform American ornithology. Compared with their predecessors, Ph.D.-trained ornithologists had a broader view of what constituted legitimate ornithological research, a stronger professional conciousness, and a greater concern with raising the standards of ornithological practice. Beginning in 1931 a leading voice among those demanding change was the German émigré naturalist Ernst Mayr. Mayr is best known as an accomplished evolutionary biologist and architect of the modern synthesis of the 1930s and 1940s.58 Throughout his long career, however, he also played a key role in shaping the direction of American ornithology. Relying on his firsthand knowledge of European traditions, ample self-confidence, and determination, Mayr sought both to broaden ornithological practice and to increase the rigor with which it was pursued.
Born in 1904 to parents who enjoyed regular family excursions into the Bavarian countryside, Mayr developed a fascination with nature from a young age.59 By the time he was a teenager he could name by sight and call all the birds in the area surrounding his home. Determined to continue a long family tradition, he enrolled as a medical student at the University of Greifswald, an institution chosen primarily because it was located in an ornithologically interesting area in the Baltic.60 Although he excelled in his medical studies, his heart was clearly not in it. After spotting the first red-crested pochards seen in central Europe in over seventy-five years, he eagerly reported his find to Erwin Stresemann, the young curator of ornithology at the Berlin Zoological Museum.61 Stresemann was so impressed with Mayr’s enthusiasm that he recruited him to volunteer in the museum during university breaks. There, working in the shadow of one of Europe’s finest ornithologist, Mayr realized that he wanted to fulfill his youthful dream of following “in the footsteps of Darwin and other great explorers of the tropics.”62 In 1925 he abandoned his medical training and enrolled at the University of Berlin. One year later he was awarded his Ph.D. degree summa cum laude for a dissertation on the range expansion of the serin finch written under Stresemann’s guidance.63
Following graduation, Mayr worked as an assistant in the Berlin Museum while searching for a suitable opportunity to head off for the tropics. He finally received his wish in 1928 when he left on what turned out to be a series of three expeditions to Dutch New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands. Working for the Berlin Museum, Walter Rothschild, and the American Museum of Natural History, Mayr spent more than two years traveling through an ornithologically rich part of the world, including several previously unexplored islands and mountain ranges.64 Though his South Pacific expeditions were to be his last, they had a profound impact on his development as a biologist, and he spent the next several decades investigating their implications. The experience also led to his appointment as visiting research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, which was anxious to have someone process the mounds of specimens that had poured in from the Whitney South Seas Expedition during the previous decade.
Mayr arrived at the American Museum during what have been described as the “golden years” of the bird department.65 Since 1920, when the department had been created by splitting the old Department of Mammalogy and Ornithology, it had enjoyed a period of unprecedented productivity, prosperity, and prominence. At the time Mayr joined, the staff already included four well-known research curators: Curator-in-Chief Frank Chapman, dean of American ornithology and author of pioneering monographs on the birds of Colombia and Ecuador; Robert C. Murphy, an authority on marine birds; James Chapin, a world expert on the birds of Africa, especially the Belgian Congo; and John T. Zimmer, a specialist on neotropical birds.66 It was a remarkable concentration of talent that became even stronger with the addition of the young, ambitious, and capable Mayr. Although much of his workday was spent cataloging specimens and performing other routine curatorial duties, Mayr also made time to pursue his own research.67 By the end of his first year at the American Museum he had described twelve new species and sixty-eight new subspecies of birds without making a serious dent in the material gathered by the more than decade-long Whitney South Sea Expedition.68
The department also benefited from strong financial backing. At the center of the patronage network supporting ornithology at the American Museum was the wealthy surgeon, sportsman, and bird collector Leonard C. Sanford.69 Sanford, who was well known in New Haven and New York social circles, gave generously of his own fortune and cajoled others into supporting his goal of developing the American Museum bird collection into the finest in the world. His greatest achievement was convincing the Henry Payne Whitney family to donate the funds for several ambitious projects that Sanford had envisioned—often independently of Chapman—including the Whitney South Sea Expedition, the Whitney Wing of the American Museum of Natural History, the Sanford Hall of the Biology of Birds, and the Whitney Hall of Oceanic Birds.70
Figure 32. Examining the Rothschild Bird Collection, ca. early 1930s. Left to right: Robert C. Murphy, Ernst Mayr, John T. Zimmer, and F. Trubee Davison.
Late in 1931 Sanford also convinced the Whitneys to purchase the world-renowned collection of birds that Walter Rothschild had been amassing at Tring, his estate in Hertfordshire, England, over the previous four decades.71 When he needed money quickly to satisfy a former lover’s demand for blackmail, Rothschild wrote to Sanford and asked if he might be interested in purchasing his 280,000-specimen bird collection. Sanford quickly jumped at the unique opportunity. After receiving promises of support from the Whitney family, he headed off to Tring with Robert Murphy and quietly negotiated a final deal. Murphy remained in England for several months to supervise the shipping of Rothschild’s collection (fig. 32), which instantly filled many gaps in the American Museum’s holdings and firmly secured its position as the leading bird collection in the world.72 The purchase also convinced Mayr to remain at the institution as the newly established Whitney-Rothschild curator, yet another Sanford initative that the Whitneys agreed to fund.
Once Mayr received his permanent appointment, he initiated a series of attempts at reforming American ornithology. One of several ways he tried to influence the direction of ornithological research was by cultivating mentoring relationships with the promising young birdwatchers with whom he came in contact. Toward that end, in 1933 Mayr organized his own monthly seminar under the auspices of the Linnaean Society of New York.
The Linnaean Society began in 1878, when several naturalists from the New York City area decided to organize a local natural history society focused on birds.73 Soon the new group was meeting twice monthly at the American Museum and issuing its own publications.74 Under the influence of presidents J. A. Allen (1889-1897), Frank Chapman (1897-1899), and Jonathan Dwight (1899-1921), the Linnaean Society initially concentrated mainly on the technical aspects of ornithology, especially taxonomy. During the 1910s there were signs of a broadening perspective when the society began serving as a national clearinghouse for bird banding records. Later that decade, assembling local bird records, usually based on sight records, became a focal point for the organization.
Among the most active Linnaean Society members during this period were a group of eight young birders from the Bronx.75 When they began attending meetings of the society, all were teenagers and all had been avid birdwatchers for years. Several had even established bird-feeding stations in city parks, published records of unusual sightings, and contributed reports for the annual Christmas census. After discovering each other at a meeting of the Linnaean Society in 1924, the teenagers decided to form a new association they dubbed the Bronx County Bird Club. With repeated practice and constant encouragement from Ludlow Griscom, who grilled them mercilessly when they reported unlikely finds at Linnaean Society meetings, the group quickly honed their field identification skills.
Under the influence of Griscom and others, the primary focus of the Linnaean Society and the Bronx County Bird Club had been on amassing records of local birds, with a special interest in rarities, accidentals, and early and late arrival dates for migrants. When Ernst Mayr began attending meetings of the Linnaean Society in the early 1930s, he was amazed at the differences between it and the German Ornithological Society, which he knew well from his years in Berlin. Although both were dominated by avocational ornithologists, he found the German Society to be “far more scientific, far more interested in life histories and breeding bird species, as well as in reports on recent literature.”76 In an attempt to bring the Linnaean Society more closely in line with his image of what a proper ornithological society should be, early in 1933 Mayr organized a regular monthly seminar in which participants took turns presenting abstracts of current avian literature, both foreign and domestic. After the first meeting, Irving Kassoy wrote Mayr declaring the seminar “a great success. Certainly we of the Bronx County Bird Club are very enthusiastic about it.”77 During the next several years, Bronx County Bird Club members were the most consistent of the dozen or so young men who regularly attended Mayr’s seminar.
Mayr also encouraged seminar participants to take up a specific research project of their own. “Everyone should have a problem” was the way one Bronx County Bird Club member recalled Mayr’s refrain.78 Soon Irving Kassoy was staying up with the barn owls, Richard Herbert was pursuing peregrine falcons, Richard Kuerzi was trailing tree swallows, and William Vogt was watching willets and organizing the National Audubon Society’s Breeding Bird Census.79 Mayr helped shift the interest of these young birdwatchers from compiling local lists to the study of behavior and breeding birds, areas where he thought they could make a genuine contribution to science. Even Mayr himself was not immune to the interest in bird behavior he had helped to ignite. Writing to a British colleague in 1938, Mayr briefly recounted the history of his ongoing seminar and claimed that several times he had begun to undertake “behavior work” himself but could not carry through with it because of his “heavy schedule at the museum.”80
One seminar participant, Joseph Hickey, later described the experience as the “turning point” in his life.81 A native of the Bronx, Hickey first discovered bird-watching when the older brother of one of his close friends purchased a copy of Reed’s Bird Guide to work on a Boy Scout merit badge. Soon Hickey and his friend John Matuszewski were wearing out the book’s pages as they trekked through the Bronx in search of new finds. Several years and many outings later, the two became founding members of the Bronx County Bird Club. Despite his continuing fascination with birds, Hickey saw no possibility of a career in ornithology and instead took his B.S. degree in history at New York University in 1930, where he was a national champion in the mile run. Following graduation he became a track coach at NYU and then took a desk job at Consolidated Edison.
After Mayr encouraged him to become more scientific in his bird study, Hickey began taking night classes in biology at NYU and later pursued his master’s degree under Aldo Leopold at the University of Wisconsin (1943) and his Ph.D. degree under Josselyn Van Tyne at the University of Michigan (1949). For his master’s thesis he submitted a book, A Guide to Bird Watching (1943), which not only introduced beginners to the fundamentals of the sport but also provided more advanced information on migration watching, census techniques, distribution studies, bird banding, and life history research.82 From cover to cover, Hickey’s book echoed the message Mayr had been drumming into the heads of his young birding companions for over a decade: with proper guidance, serious birdwatchers could move beyond compiling local lists and make important contributions to science.83 It was advice that many birdwatchers seemed eager to hear, if not always heed; within four and one-half months after its publication, Hickey’s Guide had sold five thousand copies.84 Mayr and Hickey remained good friends, and beginning in the 1940s Hickey became one of Mayr’s staunchest allies in his ongoing attempts to reform the AOU.85
Mayr’s relationship with local birdwatchers was not a one-way street. When he first arrived at the American Museum he knew no one, and while his colleagues in the bird department did their best to welcome him, they were all fifteen years or more his senior. However, after he began attending meetings of the Linnaean Society he “quickly made friends” with members of two groups with whom he regularly ventured out into the field: “Charlie Urner’s New Jersey gang and the Bronx County Bird Club.”86 Mayr went out so often with the latter group that they even elected him a member in 1934.87 As Joseph Hickey remembered it, “Mayr was our age and invited on all our (Griscom-type) field trips. The heckling of this German foreigner was tremendous, but he gave tit for tat, and any modern picture of Dr. E. Mayr as a very formal person does not square with my memory of the 1930’s. He held his own.”88 One year after election to the Bronx Country Bird Club, Mayr participated in the group’s first Christmas count to pass the one-hundred-species mark.89 Mayr’s extensive involvement with local birdwatchers not only furthered his reform agenda, but, as he later recalled, it also satisfied a deep-seated emotional need: “In those early years in New York when I was a stranger in a big city, it was the companionship and later friendship which I was offered in the Linnaean Society that was the most important thing of my life.”90
MAKING SPACE FOR NICE
While working to expand the horizons of New York area birdwatchers, Mayr also actively promoted the career of Margaret Morse Nice. He was one of the first scientific ornithologists to appreciate and champion the work of this pioneer ethologist, who in his words “almost single-handedly initiated a new era in American ornithology.”91 Together the two played a crucial role in introducing the emerging field of ethology into the United States during the 1930s and 1940s.
Like Mayr, Morse was born into a family that immersed its children in nature from a young age.92 Gardening, botanizing, and excursions into the countryside were all pursued with zeal. By the time she was nine years old, Nice began keeping notes on local birds around her home in Amherst, Massachusetts, and a family summer estate in Lyme, Connecticut. Three years later she received her “most cherished Christmas present,” a copy of Mabel Osgood Wright’s Birdcraft.93 When she entered Mt. Holyoke College in 1901, she quickly found classmates who shared her enthusiasm for hiking, canoeing, and the outdoors, but nothing in her zoology classes to fire her imagination. As she later wrote in her autobiography: “I could see very little connection between the courses in college and the wild things I loved. I benefitted from the knowledge acquired of varied forms of life, but the approach to me seemed a dead one. I did not like to cut up animals. ... I saw no future in laboratory zoology.”94 She graduated from Mt. Holyoke in 1906 and returned to her parents’ home in Amherst with little sense of what she wanted to do with her life. Not until a year later, when she heard two lectures by Clark University professor Clifton F. Hodge, did she realize it was possible to study “live animals” seriously, perhaps even as a vocation.95
Despite protests from her parents, in 1907 Nice enrolled in Clark University to pursue her master’s degree. One of only two women in the biology department, for two years she took courses and began thesis research on the food of the bobwhite.96 She first attended the AOU’s annual meeting in 1908, an experience that led her to conclude that “the role of ladies” in the organization “was largely ornamental.”97 Although she seemed to thrive at Clark, in 1909 she finally bowed to parental and societal pressure when she married physiology graduate student Leonard Blaine Nice and abandoned plans to expand her bobwhite study into a doctoral dissertation.98 As historians Mitman and Burkhardt have pointed out, Nice is a classic case in which “gender-related cultural expectations provided major obstacles to . . . scientific talents and aspirations.”99
In the face of those multiple obstacles, she did her best to carve out space for her beloved research. By keeping meals simple, sending out the wash, and “dispatch in the matter of cleaning,” Nice managed to free up enough time to pursue a variety of scientific projects, even after the birth of her four daughters.100 For the first decade after her marriage, her studies centered on the investigation of speech development in her children. It was a research program that she could tackle largely within the confines of her home and that resulted in several publications. Beginning in 1919 she recommitted herself to bird study after the purchase of a family car provided her with the mobility needed for extensive field trips. Nice became a regular presence at AOU and Wilson Society meetings, joined the Bureau of Biological Survey migration network, published a series of ornithological articles, and finished a book, Birds of Oklahoma (1924), with her husband.101 She also initiated contact with Althea Sherman, the artist and self-trained ornithologist from Iowa whose innovative publications on the nesting behavior of the flicker, the house wren, and the chimney swift provided Nice with “inspiration and instruction.”102 In their letters the two shared their frustration at their failure to keep domestic duties from intruding on their scientific studies. Later in life, Nice bristled whenever anyone dismissed her work because she had failed to complete her Ph.D. degree and lacked a formal academic appointment. More than once she was heard to exclaim, “I’m not a housewife, I am a trained zoologist.”103
Soon after the family moved to Columbus, Ohio, in 1927, Nice began banding song sparrows at Interpont, a large, heavily vegetated floodplain near her home that provided an ideal habitat for birds. By 1929 she was using colored celluloid bands to mark and follow the movements of individual birds, a technique that had been recently developed by one of Arthur Allen’s doctoral students at Cornell.104 For the next seven years, she continued to devote nearly all her spare time to the sparrow studies that were to make her famous.105
Nice first met Ernst Mayr in 1931, at an AOU meeting in Detroit.106 The two seemed to hit it off immediately. According to Nice, Mayr was delighted to find an American “interested in more than faunistic records and pretty pictures.”107 He seemed particularly impressed with Nice’s desire to learn more about the research being done abroad and her facility with foreign languages, a skill developed during her Mt. Holyoke days. At their first meeting Mayr suggested she request reprints from several Europeans pursuing life-history research, provided her with their addresses, and set her to reading the Journal fur Ornithologie and other foreign periodicals American ornithologists typically ignored. Less than a month later Nice reported that she was disappointed to discover that the “Germans know all that we are doing, while we know almost nothing of what they are doing.”108
In 1932 Nice traveled to Europe with her husband, who was attending an International Physiological Conference in Rome. Mayr helped her plan the itinerary and provided letters of introduction for several prominent ornithologists in Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, and England, including the ethologist Oscar Heinroth and Mayr’s mentor in Berlin, Erwin Stresemann, with whom she spent ten days. When she mentioned her difficulty securing a publisher for her song sparrow studies because American journals refused to print lengthy articles, Stresemann offered to place her manuscript in the Journal für Ornithologie, one of the most prestigious ornithological journals in the world.109 After Mayr declared the manuscript left him “speechless,” she sent it on to Berlin, and her first major song sparrow publication—totaling nearly 150 printed pages—appeared in German in Stresemann’s journal.110
With Mayr’s cooperation and encouragement, Nice provided a vital link between the American and European ornithological communities. After returning to the United States, she thanked Mayr again for starting her “on the road to acquaintance with European bird literature” and said that she hoped to awaken a similar interest within her fellow citizens.111 Toward that end she began writing several hundred critical abstracts per year of both foreign and domestic literature. Most of her abstracts dealt with life-history and behavioral studies, and the vast majority were published in Bird-Banding.112 She and Mayr also lobbied to get abstracts, longer reviews, and articles from abroad published in other American ornithological periodicals. As she wrote Grinnell in 1932, trying to get reviews of foreign literature published in the Condor. “Too many American ornithologists have despised the study of the living bird; the magazine[s] and the books that deal with the subject abound in careless statements, anthropomorphic interpretations, repetition of ancient errors and sweeping conclusions from a pitiful array of facts.” However, “in Europe the study of the living bird is taken seriously. We could learn a great deal from their writing.”113 Soon Nice was boasting to Mayr, “Aren’t we having a fine success with our plans?”114
Mayr and Nice were particularly influential in disseminating European research on animal behavior, especially research from the emerging school of ethology that Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen were beginning to forge in the 1930s. After meeting Lorenz at the Eighth International Ornithological Conference in Oxford in 1934, Nice arranged for him to begin corresponding with American researchers Wallace Craig and Francis H. Herrick and abstracted his landmark “Kumpan” article.115 During this period, she and Mayr wrote separate historical articles on the development of territory theory, both of which stressed European contributions.116 In 1938 the two helped arrange for Niko Tinbergen’s visit to the United States, and Nice spent a month with Lorenz at his home in Austria. There she learned how to raise baby birds and what to look for in their development for the next phase of her song sparrow research. One year later Mayr, who was then editor for the Linnaean Society of New York, published Tinbergen’s Behavior of the Snow Bunting in Spring.117 Not only were ethological ideas and techniques beginning to pervade Nice’s research on song sparrows, but thanks to her and Mayr’s continuing efforts, they gained a wide hearing throughout the English-speaking world.
One of the greatest favors that Mayr did for Nice was to push her into writing and arrange publication of her two-volume Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow, a work that firmly secured her place in the annals of American ornithology. After prodding from his regular birding companion, the publisher Charlie Urner, in 1934 Mayr agreed to serve as editor for the Linnaean Society.118 Although he had no previous experience in the area, he knew the society needed to move beyond its typical fare of faunistic records if it hoped to gain more national and international visibility. Following the publication of Nice’s lengthy song sparrow article in the Journal fur Ornithologie, Mayr wrote her an encouraging letter in which he called her song sparrow work “the finest piece of life-history work ever done” and offered to publish the entire study in the Transactions of the Linnaean Society of New York, “even if it runs to three volumes.”119 According to Mayr, with the Depression reaching its height, he had a great deal of trouble convincing the society to publish an expensive “monograph by a bird watcher from Ohio,” especially one that was “all statistical and most uninteresting.” However, with support from Urner and several “young ‘Turks’ ” in the organization, Mayr finally received the go-ahead. He even obtained authorization to print a thousand copies of the first volume, although the previous Transactions volume had only sold a hundred copies in three years.120 Nice’s first volume, A Population Study of the Song Sparrow, appeared in 1937 and was dedicated to “My Friend Ernst Mayr.”121 Besides providing personal satisfaction and the chance to further his reform agenda, editing this and other Linnaean Society publications supplied Mayr with valuable experience that he put to use again when he founded the Society for the Study of Evolution and began editing Evolution in the mid-1940s.122
Having gone out on a limb to publish Nice’s work, Mayr did everything possible to make it a success. To secure as much notice as possible for the first volume, Mayr actively sought out appropriate reviewers. He sent a copy of the book to Aldo Leopold, who wrote a highly favorable review that he hoped Mayr could place in Science.123 Mayr also convinced Joseph Grinnell to publish a short notice of the work in the Condor (even though the journal did not normally publish book reviews) and arranged for him to offer the volume for sale at the MVZ.124 Another review copy went to the French ornithologist and aviculturist Jean Delacour, who praised Nice’s study as “Perhaps the most important contribution yet published to our knowledge of the life of a species.”125 Following the book’s publication in 1937, Nice was elected the first woman president of the Wilson Club and, after a campaign orchestrated by Mayr, to fellowship in the AOU, only the second woman to be so honored. Thanks in part to Mayr’s promotional efforts, within several years the first printing of the volume one was sold out and the Linnaean Society had turned a profit. Clearly Mayr had been vindicated.
REFORMING THE AOU
While Mayr sought to expand ornithological practice in the United States, he also worked to revitalize the American Ornithologists’ Union. He was not the only one worried about the direction of the organization. By the time the AOU was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 1933, many university-trained ornithologists were beginning to view it as an outmoded institution with less and less relevance to modern ornithological research. Besides Mayr, the most vocal critic in this reform campaign was Herbert Friedmann, a Ph.D.-trained ornithologist who was Mayr’s contemporary in age. In one of their initial exchanges, Friedmann said he felt he had a “good deal in common” with Mayr in terms of general outlook and that the two of them would surely face stiff opposition as they tried “to educate the older school of ornithologists.”126
Friedmann was born in 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, and became seriously interested in ornithology as a teenager, following regular visits to the bird exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History.127 While attending City College in Manhattan, he began systematically observing the nesting behavior of the redbilled weaver bird at the New York Zoological Park. The study led to his first scientific publication and a decision to pursue a graduate degree at Cornell under Arthur A. Allen’s direction.128 In 1923, after completing his doctoral dissertation on cowbird parasitism, he began a three-year National Research Council-Rockefeller Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, where he worked with the entomologist and animal behavior researcher William Morton Wheeler. Much of this fellowship period he spent chasing after parasitic birds in South America and Africa. When his fellowship ran out, Friedmann began teaching biology at Brown University and Amherst College. In 1929 he published his first book, The Cowbirds: A Study in the Biology of Social Parasitism, gained election to fellowship in the AOU, and accepted an offer to become curator of the bird collection at the U.S. National Museum in Washington, a position that had become vacant following the death of Robert Ridgway.129
Though the pay was much better than his former job at Amherst, Friedmann’s new position frustrated him. His colleagues in the Division of Birds, Charles Richmond and Joseph H. Riley, were dedicated workers, but they were much older than he was, lacking in formal biological training, and content to pursue what he considered uninspired taxonomic studies.130 As Friedmann later recalled, he felt they were “the old fashion type of ornithologist to whom a bird was not a living creature but a dead specimen” while his “interest in birds was in their biology and in their behavior and habits rather than straight taxonomy.”131 In addition, his supervisor, the Ph.D.-trained ornithologist and avian paleontologist Alexander Wetmore, was preoccupied with administering the U.S. National Museum and, in Friedmann’s eyes, “failed to keep up with current thinking in biology.”132 Moreover, Friedmann had been hired with the expectation that he would finish Ridgway’s multivolume Birds of Middle and North America, even though he believed the project was based on a hopelessly antiquated approach to ornithology.133 The stock market crash that signaled the beginning of the Great Depression several months after he arrived in Washington thwarted plans to escape quickly to a university position but failed to dampen his enthusiasm for reform.
Soon after Mayr arrived in the United States, he and Friedmann began discussing a variety of proposals to revitalize the AOU, the Auk, and American ornithological practice more generally. For example, in a letter written in early 1932, Friedmann revealed that he had long ago reached the conclusion that “the A.O.U. was hopeless as far as science was concerned, and that the ‘Auk’ was as incapable of progress as its equally dead name-sake”: “If it were only possible to get A.O.U. people to study the change in the J[ournal] f[ür] Ornithologie since Stresemann took charge, it might be possible to talk to them, but it isn’t. People like Chapin and others who have had enough biological training are satisfied, so what can you expect of individuals like Palmer, Stone, Peters, Murphy, etc.”134 Friedmann claimed that he had even contemplated starting a more scientific journal to compete with the Auk but was forced to abandon his plans with the beginning of the Great Depression, when finances were tight and he realized that there were “not enough real ornithologists to make a scientific journal self-supporting.”135 Friedmann may have been grandstanding for Mayr, but his sentiment accurately reflected the younger generation’s growing impatience with the AOU.
One recurrent source of complaint was the process of selecting ornithologists to be honored with election to fellowship in the organization. Although the size of the ornithological community had grown steadily over the years, the AOU continued its original policy of strictly limiting the number of fellows to fifty. One result of this decision was that there were few openings for younger ornithologists, no matter how well-trained and accomplished they might be. Exacerbating this age imbalance was an ongoing geographical imbalance. Ornithologists outside the Washington-Philadelphia-Boston axis—the historical center of AOU membership—had long complained that they were routinely passed over when it came time to elect fellows into the organization.136 Besides being unfair, critics feared that the failure to elect obviously qualified candidates to fellowship also led to a decline in the status of the honor “among zoologists in university circles.”137
All these issues were on Joseph Grinnell’s mind when he wrote Friedmann early in 1935 suggesting that his former student, Alden Miller, be nominated for fellowship in the AOU. According to Grinnell, “we badly need, on active status in the A.O.U., young workers—such as have proven their abiding interest in the field of ornithology and who have established favorable reputation on the basis of actual production.” If the AOU did not begin electing qualified members of the younger generation into its two highest membership categories (fellowship and elective member), it would continue on the road toward “further senility,” a trend that had already been “in evidence ... for some years.”138 In his reply, Friedmann echoed Grinnell’s concern about the declining position of the AOU:
For several proponents of reform, the final straw came during the AOU’s annual meeting held in Toronto later that year.140 According to the critics, Washington-based ornithologists associated with the Smithsonian Institution and (espedaily) the Bureau of the Biological Survey had long controlled the election of officers, fellows, and members in the AOU. They could do this because of their large numbers—in 1930 they comprised more than 20 percent of the fellows and an even larger portion of those who typically attended the annual meetings—and because under the rules of the AOU, the first ballot was a nominating ballot. The Washington contingent tended to vote in unison on the first ballot, while the rest of the fellows usually spread their votes among several candidates. In 1935 there was a single opening for fellow, and the Washingtonians succeeded in electing the aging Edward A. Preble—a longtime veteran of the Bureau of the Biological Survey—over the up-and-coming Margaret Morse Nice. According to the critics, Preble was more a mammalogist than an ornithologist and in any case had failed to publish anything of note in over a dozen years, while the graduate-trained Nice had published a lengthy, innovative paper in the prestigious Journal für Ornithologie as well as a respectable number of more traditional reviews, articles, and books.141 In the eyes of Mayr, Friedmann, and other Nice supporters, the 1935 election was yet another clear case in which the old-boy network had triumphed over scientific merit in the AOU.
Another issue needling reformers was the current editor of the Auk, the most visible and influential position in the organization. Witmer Stone had been a popular choice to take over management of the journal when founding editor J. A. Allen finally decided to step down in 1911. At the time Stone was a respected avian taxonomist with a decade of experience editing Cassinia. However, by the early 1930s he was in his mid-sixties, suffering from chronic heart disease, and (according to his critics) increasingly out of touch with modern ornithological trends. Concerns about Stone’s editorial policy were one factor that prompted Joseph Grinnell to survey AOU fellows regarding the direction of the organization in 1930 and one of the things he highlighted in the presidential address based on that survey.142
The reservations about how Stone was editing Auk were varied. Several AOU members regretted his failure to exercise more editorial discretion. Stone had a reputation for writing lenient book reviews and accepting for publication nearly all the manuscripts that came across his desk. The result was a large backlog of submissions, long delays in publication, a decline in quality, and the imposition of a twenty-page limit for most articles.143 In the face of these problems, many graduate-trained ornithologists—especially those pursuing more innovative life-history, behavioral, physiological, and ecological studies—sought other channels for their work, just as Nice had been forced to do with her first song sparrow paper.144 Beyond these complaints was the concern that in an effort to maintain a healthy subscription list, Stone catered far too much to the large contingent of associate members who paid the bulk of the AOU’s dues. According to the critics, the end of the “Stone Age” of the Auk was long overdue.145
Reform-minded ornithologists also worried about other AOU officers. In the early 1930s, the AOU’s secretary—T. S. Palmer—and treasurer—W. L. McAtee—were both career employees of the Bureau of the Biological Survey, longterm holders of their respective offices, and paid what some considered an unreasonable portion of the AOU annual budget (ca. 20 percent) to carry out their duties.146 The largely self-trained Palmer particularly annoyed the younger ornithologists. Although he had once been an effective lobbyist for bird conservation, he had never published much in the way of significant ornithological research. Critics also charged that he demanded an unreasonable amount of time to transact routine business at annual AOU meetings, he required too much space in the Auk reporting on those meetings, and he sometimes failed to report nominations for AOU fellows that were apparently not to his liking.147 Moreover, he seemed obsessed with gathering and publishing biographical data on deceased AOU members. It was a characteristic that may have endeared him to later historians, but it irked his contemporary critics. Even his more sympathetic colleagues referred to him as “Tomb Stone” Palmer (fig. 33).
Figure 33. Caricature of T. S. Palmer, 1927. Part of a series that E. R. Kalmbach produced for the annual AOU meeting.
After the 1935 election debacle, reformers moved into high gear. Early the following year Stone’s health began deteriorating rapidly. It was clear to all that after twenty-five years as editor of the Auk, he would finally be forced to resign. A search committee recommended that Glover M. Allen, a Harvard Ph.D. and curator of mammalogy at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, be elected to replace Stone, a nomination that AOU fellows approved at their annual meeting in October 1936.148 Although he too was better known as a mammalogist than as an ornithologist, for the previous year Friedmann had been actively campaigning for Allen, whom he believed possessed the “scholarship and detached judgment” to move the publication forward again.149 The reformers failed to replace Secretary Palmer when their candidate backed out at the last moment. When pressed, however, Palmer suggested that after twenty years in office, he would be willing to step down at the next annual meeting.150
Reformers also pushed through several changes in the AOU bylaws at the 1936 meeting. Following Friedmann’s suggestion, AOU fellows voted to create a new category of membership, “emeritus fellow,” though they failed to go along with the idea of making transfer to the new category automatic at a certain age or of allowing the AOU Council to mandate the process for those fellows who refused to volunteer.151 At the same meeting, elective members gained the right to hold the offices of secretary, treasurer, and council member. The council, the principle governing body of the organization, was also increased from seven to nine members and divided into groups that would serve one-, two-, and three-year terms of office. The overall effect of these changes was to open the management of the AOU to a much broader segment of the organization, including many in the younger generation.
Emboldened by their success at the 1936 meeting, the reformers pushed for even deeper change the next year. Late in the summer of 1937, Mayr began circulating a draft of seven far-reaching amendments to the AOU constitution and bylaws along with a detailed explanation of why he thought each was needed.152 In discussing his rationale for the proposals, Mayr repeatedly stressed how much the policies of the AOU varied from those of similar organizations in the United States and Europe.
Most of the reforms were designed to restore the scientific standing of the organization. In an effort to ensure that future AOU elections were based more on ornithological achievement than on politics, Mayr suggested that nominations for fellowship be accompanied by “a detailed statement of the qualifications of the nominee and by a bibliography of his principal scientific publications during the last five years.” To improve the quality of the papers published in the Auk and delivered at the annual meetings, Mayr recommended the creation of two new committees: an editorial board that would assist the editor in soliciting, refereeing, and proofreading articles, and a program committee with the authority to accept and reject papers, invite speakers, and arrange special symposia.153 In a variation of Friedmann’s earlier suggestion, Mayr also advised that the AOU Council be authorized to transfer to the newly established category of emeritus fellow any fellow who had failed to attend the annual meeting or to publish any “scientific ornithological papers” in the preceding five years.
Two additional proposals were intended to shore up the financial position of the AOU, which had become increasingly precarious as the Depression dragged on. One sign of fiscal distress was a forced reduction in the size of the Auk after many financially strapped members stopped paying their annual dues. To free up funds for restoring the size and improving the appearance of the AOU’s official publication, Mayr suggested eliminating the salary paid to the treasurer and secretary of the AOU.154 Not only would making these two positions honorary be more consistent with practices at most other scientific societies throughout the world, but it would also weaken the resolve of officers like Palmer, who continued to seek reelection year after year. Mayr also felt it important that a summary of the income and expenses of the AOU be made public at annual meetings and printed in the Auk.
Mayr’s most controversial proposal involved equalizing “duties and rights” of all classes of resident members (associates, members, fellows, and emeritus fellows).155 Mayr felt that doing so would reinvigorate the lethargic organization by instilling a sense of enthusiasm and responsibility in all those connected with it. However, he decided to drop this proposal when several of his colleagues expressed fear that “some irresponsible group of conservationists might get hold of the Society” if associate members were granted too many rights.156 Hoping to break the Washington monopoly on AOU elections, Mayr and his reform-minded colleagues also discussed appropriate candidates for fellowship as well as the offices of secretary and president, both of which were due to be vacated that year.
The 1937 annual meeting was a mixed bag for those hoping to rejuvenate the AOU. On the one hand, most of Mayr’s reforms failed to gain immediate passage.157 Apparently they were simply too much too soon for what remained an essentially conservative organization.158 The fact that the proposals originated from a brash young outsider—Mayr was not yet even a fellow of the AOU when he began circulating them—also contributed to their downfall.159 Even some of his strongest supporters considered Mayr too pushy for his own good. In a letter to Joseph Grinnell discussing possible successors to Stone, Herbert Friedmann claimed that Mayr wanted to be editor of the Auk, but that he would “be opposed by everyone—his insolent attitude and his groundless arrogance rule him out, although he has ability and energy.”160
The news from the annual meeting was not all bad. Election results suggested that despite the general failure of Mayr’s reform package, there was sentiment for change within the AOU. One hopeful sign was the election of both Mayr and Nice to fellowship in the AOU, the only members to be so honored at the 1937 meeting. Another was the election of the reformers’ choice for secretary, Lawrence E. Hicks, a young ornithologist and botanist with a Ph.D. degree from Ohio State, a close friend of Nice, and secretary of the Wilson Ornithological Club.161 For the previous year Friedmann had been promoting Hicks as a suitable replacement for Palmer, who reneged on his earlier promise to retire gracefully.162 Even more heartening was the election of Friedmann himself to the presidency of the AOU.
Friedmann rode to office on a wave of optimism. As he wrote to Grinnell immediately following the meeting, he hoped to begin restoring the AOU to a position of “progressive active leadership in ornithological trends and tendencies in America.” To begin achieving this ambition, he floated the idea of establishing a research committee “to determine the lines of work the Union should use its influence to advocate.”163 Friedmann felt that systematics was “already well taken care of,” so the new committee should concentrate on promoting the “relatively untilled fields of avian physiology, genetics, [and] psychology.” He also called for the AOU to cooperate more fully with other ornithological organizations in the United States, rather than continuing to ignore them as it had tended to do in the past. Once the AOU was showing signs of renewed vigor, then it would be time to begin an endowment campaign as a first step in making the Auk a “more comprehensive scientific journal,” less dependent on “popular mass subscription.”164
Like many reformers, Friedmann found it was much easier to damn than deliver. As one of his first acts of office, he did establish a research committee like the one discussed in his letter to Grinnell.165 According to Mayr, however, the committee was never effective in promoting or coordinating ornithological research and was soon defunct.166 At the first annual meeting over which he presided in 1938, Friedmann also received permission to appoint a committee to consider allowing major regional ornithological societies to elect representatives to the AOU Council.167 The committee reported favorably on the idea, which was eventually approved at the 1940 annual meeting. Friedmann also successfully lobbied for the creation of a nominating committee to propose suitable candidates for election to the categories of fellows, members, honorary fellows, and corresponding fellows and to review the qualifications of those candidates.168 However, Friedmann’s dream of raising an endowment sufficient to liberate the AOU from its continued dependence on avocational ornithologists remained unfilled when he was voted out of office in 1939.169
Although the reformers were frustrated at the slow pace of change, they made significant progress during the 1930s and early 1940s. Through a series of amendments to the AOU’s bylaws and constitution as well as several carefully orchestrated election campaigns, they largely succeeded in wresting control of the organization from the older generation of ornithologists. There were setbacks, of course. Not until 1950 was another Ph.D.-trained ornithologist, Josselyn Van Tyne, elected to the presidency of the organization, and the old guard continued to dominate the AOU Council for many years. From the late 1930s on, however, most other major officers of the AOU had at least some graduate training, and none served the excessive terms of office that had been common during the first fifty years of the AOU. There were still many battles for the reformers to fight, but clearly the AOU—and American ornithology more generally—had reached a crucial turning point.170