CHAPTER III
“A Fairly Sharp Rap on the Knuckles”
Preparations for Chicago’s first season of actual excavation at Megiddo began in the early months of 1926, well before Breasted’s visit. The team needed to procure visas for their Egyptian workmen, so that the men could travel to British Mandate Palestine. They also wanted to make certain that they didn’t have to pay customs duties on any of the equipment that they had shipped over, from their automobile to tents, photographic material, steel filing cabinets, and pieces of the light railway that they planned to build (and which they referred to in correspondence simply as “the Decauville,” after the French manufacturing company that made it). And, perhaps more important than anything else, at least in terms of their health, they hoped to work with the government to get the swamps filled in, in order to eradicate the mosquitoes and thus the malaria infecting all of them.1
During his visit in March, Breasted thought that everything was going well—so much so that he cheerily remarked to Luckenbill afterward, “Everything is going splendidly at Megiddo.” All of the team members had recovered from their bouts with malaria, according to Breasted; the house was almost finished and was very comfortable; and the digging was to begin soon.
A photo taken during his visit confirms much of this—gathered in front of the house are the team members, including DeLoach, Higgins, Breasted and his son Charles, and Fisher, as well as a number of workmen, with Stanley perched on the sill of an upstairs window. The house looks stout and well built, with shutters open on every window. Next to the men is parked the team’s “International” truck, in very good shape, with open sides covered by a grille and with shades that could be rolled down as protection from the dust and sun.
Breasted’s later description of the dig house differed slightly from DeLoach’s earlier one. In the Oriental Institute handbook issued in August 1928, he said that it was “built of heavy stone masonry,” with a double roof. There was actually more than one building, as can be seen in photographs from that time. The largest one contained the living and working quarters, including the drafting rooms and the darkroom for photography. The other buildings contained workshops, the kitchen and provision storage rooms, an area for storing the antiquities, and a three-car garage.2
FIG. 9. Breasted visit to Megiddo, March 1926; left to right: Edward DeLoach, Daniel Higgins, James Henry Breasted, Charles Breasted, Clarence Fisher, with Stanley Fisher perched on the sill of an upstairs window (from the estate of C. Stanley Fisher, courtesy of Barbara A. Keller)
Breasted specifically said that Fisher and Higgins were being “perfectly courteous to each other.”3 In fact, it was all an act—the two men were being cordial to each other strictly for his benefit, but he became aware of that only long after the fact.4
The workmen arrived by mid-April and the first season of excavation finally began a few days later. The plan was to work in two main areas: the lower part of the eastern slope, where everything would be investigated and then cleared away so that the material removed from the top of the mound could be dumped in this area; and on the top of the mound, where an area on the eastern side, near Schumacher’s Great Trench, would be investigated and the various layers removed after each had been investigated in turn—first Stratum I, then Stratum II, III, and so on.5
Less than a week into the dig season, however, the power struggle between Fisher and Higgins finally erupted into the open.6 Instead of having it out with Higgins on the spot, Fisher fled to Jerusalem.7 From there he sent the cable to Chicago, resigning his position as field director and citing irreconcilable differences with Higgins. As we have seen, Breasted refused to accept the resignation and confirmed instead that Fisher was the sole director at Megiddo.8 Breasted also cabled Higgins at the same time, “giving him a fairly sharp rap on the knuckles,” as he later told Luckenbill. The terse message read simply, “WORK AT MEGIDDO MUST BE DONE UNDER FISHER’S SOLE INSTRUCTIONS LOYAL COOPERATION WITH HIM INDISPENSABLE.”9
Eventually the details began to emerge as to what had happened, courtesy of letters written by DeLoach and by Kellogg, who joined the team in May. Kellogg had been studying with Luckenbill at the Oriental Institute, after graduating from Yale in 1921. However, he wished to gain experience in the field as well as learn the ancient languages and history in the classroom, so he contracted with Breasted to join the Megiddo expedition after the university’s winter quarter had ended.
A good-looking young man, standing five feet eleven, with blue eyes and brown hair, Kellogg was twenty-eight years old at the time, hailing from Watertown, New York. He quickly became the “inside man” at Megiddo, reporting back to both Breasted and Luckenbill about the goings-on between Higgins, Fisher, and the others. He kept firm to his plan to excavate only for the portion of the season that remained that year and to return to Chicago for courses in the fall. And so we eventually find him on a ship’s manifest returning to New York in October 1926, never to return to Megiddo again.10 However, at the moment, all of that still lay a few chaotic months ahead.
According to Kellogg, it was hard to say who was more to blame. While Higgins was extremely tactless and had antagonized everybody since his arrival, Fisher had his own faults, including some that probably made him unfit to serve as director.11
“Dr. Fisher certainly is a good technician,” Kellogg noted, “but absolutely without a practical hair in his head and with no ideas at all of organization, and because of temperament unable to assume a dictatory attitude.” His assessment of the situation was blunt and straightforward: “Fisher has too much reticence and Higgins too much of the opposite. He (Higgins) has a good deal of ability and great breadth of interest which however should be kept a good deal of the time within narrower limits. Fisher isn’t the man to see that this is done.”12
Those back home in Chicago clearly agreed with Kellogg’s appraisal, for Luckenbill later told Breasted, “Of Fisher’s lack of executive ability I have been aware for twenty-five years.… And it is true that Higgins has the American bluff that puts things over. Allah be with us and them!”13
However, in the meantime, Breasted’s reply to Fisher had the desired effect on him. Reassured as to his status, Fisher cabled back, “EVERY EFFORT WILL BE MADE TO INSURE MEGIDDO SUCCESS.”14 Kellogg later reported that Breasted’s cable had given Fisher sufficient courage to come back to the dig and resume his duties.
However, the cable to Higgins had the opposite effect. He was not happy in the least. In his opinion, Fisher was simply a spoiled child who shouldn’t have bothered Breasted with their trivial differences, just as Higgins had refrained from troubling Breasted about them during his recent visit. Feeling that he was blameless in all of this, and that Fisher was the one who was actually at fault, Higgins sent back a snarky reply to Breasted.
Breasted’s cable to him was “amazing” (and not in a good way), said Higgins. He then itemized five possible causes for Fisher’s complaints about him; all were written in the third person. The first item on the list read: “Recalcitrant Higgins and DeLoach did cause to have removed a gigantic latrine (‘the skyscraper’), erected by Fisher prominently by the main gate, to a less unseemly site.” Another entry continued the theme, declaring: “Said Higgins did on numerous occasions willfully resent the promiscuous deposition of human excrement in immediate juxtaposition to our camp and excavations … and that at last he insisted on latrines for the workmen.”15 Breasted was not pleased; he did not appreciate receiving such a letter in response to his “knuckle-rapping” cable, even if several of Higgins’s points did have obvious merit.
Meanwhile, by now it was mid-May and so, at the same time that all of this was going on, they began work on the East Slope of the mound. Fisher wanted to start in on the top of the site as well, but he was stymied by the fact that Higgins had not yet completed, or perhaps had not even begun, his survey of the area and had not created an initial plan. So they continued to dig only in the same area on the eastern slope where they had been working in the fall, in an effort to clear the area before using it as a dump for dirt and debris that would come from the excavations at the top of the tell.16
It was slow going, since they didn’t have many workmen. Moreover, the whole area was honeycombed with tombs from different periods, a number of which had collapsed, crushing the pottery and other burial goods that were inside. It had also been used as a quarry sometime later, and Fisher surmised that those quarrymen of antiquity had frequently stopped to rob the tombs that they came across during their work. He was also keenly aware that Schumacher had excavated in the area previously and had already cleared out a number of the tombs.
As the weeks wore on, Higgins, who should have been occupied with surveying the top of the mound so that they could begin digging there, instead filled his days by photographing some of the pottery and other objects, as well as the details of the excavations. He was also frequently gone for a week or more at a time, visiting his family in Beirut and taking on external projects, which frustrated Fisher no end. DeLoach was kept busy doing the real drafting work, drawing and planning the tombs as they were excavated.
FIG. 10. Sorting pottery in the Megiddo dig house (courtesy of the American School of Oriental Research Archives, Nelson Glueck Photograph Collection)
One Egyptian workman, Ali, was in charge of washing the baskets full of pottery sherds that came in from the tombs and elsewhere, and then fitting the various pieces together. Three local boys helped him, but even so the courtyard of the house quickly filled up with baskets of pottery waiting to be sorted.
Fisher noted that as soon as the pottery had been drawn, “only those which are worthy of being kept for Museum purposes are placed in the store-room with registry numbers.” Complete pots were always saved, he said, as were decorated pieces, but the other undecorated pieces were simply discarded, by being reburied in one of the tombs.17 Even so, with the amount of pottery that was coming in, and with no one else available to help him but his nephew Stanley upon occasion, Fisher was soon overwhelmed and rapidly fell behind in drawing and recording everything.
Fortunately, everything suddenly slowed down in early June. Only six of the Egyptian workmen were actually digging at the time and many of the local workers had returned to the fields to harvest their crops. The Chicago team had also used up all of their money and were playing for time until the next installment arrived on 1 July.18 It is unclear how many men had been employed at the height of the season, though we know Fisher complained at one point that he had only 80 local workmen when he could have used 150.19
Two weeks later, in mid-June, a cable arrived from Breasted. Without preamble, it simply declared: “UNIVERSITY IS RELIEVING HIGGINS BY CABLE TODAY OF ALL FURTHER DUTY IMMEDIATELY YOU ARE AUTHORIZED [TO] PAY HIM RETURN TRAVELLING EXPENSES WHEN HE LEAVES.”20 Fisher’s relief was palpable.
Breasted also sent a second cable that same day. This one went directly to Higgins. We do not have the original, but a handwritten draft in the Oriental Institute archives states bluntly: “University will not require your services after July thirty-first and you are hereby relieved of further duty as of this date. Your return travelling expenses will be paid by Doctor Fisher who is in no wise responsible for nor until today aware of this action. Please cable date leaving and balance salary to end July will be deposited immediately [to] your bank account.”21
Higgins had been in Beirut for several weeks beforehand but happened to be at Megiddo on the day that both cables arrived. Rather than talking it over with Fisher, Higgins replied directly to Chicago instead, first offering to work for only $100 per month for the next year and then demanding to be paid for August and September. Subsequently, he departed for Beirut, returned briefly to get his belongings in mid-July, and then moved with his family back to the United States.22
It is quite clear from the extant letters exactly why Higgins was suddenly fired, for his snarky response to the earlier cable had antagonized Breasted, as mentioned. Breasted had responded immediately with a letter berating Higgins for his lack of loyalty and obedience, which Breasted valued above all else in his team members. He ended the letter by telling Higgins how disappointed he was in him. Then, on 16 June, the same day that he sent Higgins the cable telling him that he had been fired, Breasted sent him another long letter that itemized, point by point, exactly how Higgins had disappointed him and the reasons for which he was being fired.23 Such a letter, it seems, was typical of Breasted, for he eventually sent a similarly detailed letter to Guy, when he fired him almost exactly six years later, in August 1934.
In the long letter to Higgins, Breasted wrote that additional facts had come to his attention since they had met at Megiddo back in March, including the fact that, while en route to Megiddo the previous August, and before having ever even been to the site, Higgins had hired an Armenian as an assistant surveyor, without first consulting Breasted. Apparently, the man was eventually dismissed, but only after he had cost the expedition hundreds of dollars and filed a lawsuit against both Fisher and Higgins. This lawsuit, which is nowhere else mentioned in the archives, seems to have been settled without Breasted’s knowledge until after the fact. Breasted also noted that Higgins’s total lack of the tact and graciousness that are necessary on a field excavation had “all but wrecked the Expedition.” He concluded, “What you have failed to see is that it is just as important to maintain successful working relations with other members of an Expedition as it is to know how to do the work at all.”24 In that, Breasted was absolutely correct, for the same still holds true on archaeological excavations today.
However, there was one other episode that Breasted did not mention in his letter, but which likely also contributed to Higgins’s firing. It is alluded to only in passing, in various places, beginning with an aside that Kellogg made to Breasted in mid-July. While discussing, after the fact, their good fortune in being rid of Higgins, for he wasn’t the type of man whom they wanted associated with the work that they were doing at Megiddo, Kellogg also said that Higgins had created “quite a mess between Luckenbill and Albright.”25 He didn’t elaborate further on what had happened, but then again he probably didn’t need to, for Breasted was undoubtedly all too well aware of what had transpired. It had taken place months earlier, soon after the men arrived at Megiddo.
Albright had come to visit the dig back in mid-October 1925 but, as later biographers of Albright have delicately put it, there was “a misunderstanding … and Albright was forbidden access to the mound.” Outraged, Albright sent a letter to Luckenbill, telling him what had happened, but Luckenbill—thinking that Albright was traveling in Mesopotamia—didn’t answer for nearly six months. When he did reply, in mid-April 1926, Luckenbill said that he had no idea why anyone at Megiddo would “exclude Albright from the site.” Albright, in turn, wrote back two months later, saying that he had long since decided that it was all the result of a misunderstanding, and that he was certain that neither Luckenbill nor Breasted had meant for him to be denied permission to see the site.26 Higgins also confirmed that, by then, the “Albright matter,” as he called it, had gone quiet.27 In the meantime, Fisher, who apparently was not there at the time, also tried to smooth things over, telling Albright that he was always welcome at the site, and that he would show Albright around himself.28
But who would have denied Albright, the director of the American School in Jerusalem, access to the site? We know that there were only four staff members present in October 1925—Clarence Fisher, Stanley Fisher, Edward DeLoach, and Daniel Higgins. Of those, both DeLoach and Stanley Fisher were young and very junior; they would never have done such a thing. It could only have been Fisher or Higgins who denied entry to Albright, but based on Kellogg’s letter, it appears that it was Higgins. However, in his defense, Higgins may not have been acting entirely on his own, because back in June, even while they were still appointing the staff members, Luckenbill and Breasted had discussed the fact that “the Oriental Institute was not ready to have any supervision of its work by Dr. Albright.” Luckenbill, in fact, said that he had made it clear to Fisher that “we could not be expected to do much cooperating with him [Albright].”29
So even if Higgins had denied entry to Albright, he might not have been completely out of line. Still, as Albright’s biographers note, the incident “nearly shattered the expedition.”30 Thus the firing of Higgins, even so belatedly—eight months after the event—will have begun to set things right and to patch up what could have been a professional disaster pitting some of the best-known names in archaeology and Assyriology against each other just as the excavation was getting under way.
Fisher and the others undoubtedly held at least a mild celebration after Higgins was sacked in mid-June. However, another cable, sent by Breasted three days later, poured cold water on the festivities. This one read: “GREATLY INTERESTED IN RESULTS ON SLOPES. PLEASE CABLE WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR DELAYED SURVEY AND EXCAVATION OF TOP. PLEASE BE PERFECTLY FRANK. SHIELD NOBODY. BREASTED.”31
Fisher’s reply must have cost a pretty penny, for it is by far the lengthiest cablegram in the Megiddo archives at the Oriental Institute. In it, Fisher laid the blame squarely upon the just-fired Higgins:
DESPITE SUMMIT PLANS NOT BEING STARTED BEGAN EXCAVATING THERE APRIL EIGHTEENTH STOP HIGGINS DEMANDED WORK BE SUSPENDED UNTIL MAP FINISHED, CLAIMING HE REPRESENTED CHICAGO’S INTEREST I THEN CABLED MY RESIGNATION STOP HIGGINS PLACED MEN ON NEW SLOPE AREA WHERE INTERESTING MATERIAL WAS DISCOVERED I ASSUME FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR FAILURE TO INSIST UPON OUR ORIGINAL SCHEME BEING FOLLOWED BUT ACCEPTED HIGGINS’ STATEMENT OF HIS AUTHORITY WITHOUT QUESTION STOP ALWAYS WILL FOLLOW YOUR SUGGESTIONS. DELOACH NOW LOOKING AFTER SURVEY OF EXCAVATIONS.32
Fisher later elaborated further, in a sworn statement that he was required to make in late July. In it, he answered fifteen separate questions concerning Higgins and his work. Within his responses, he noted that Higgins had spent two weeks out of each month away from Megiddo, even during the excavation season: one week was spent in Beirut—though Fisher neglected to say that Higgins was visiting his family there—and the other was spent at Tell en-Nasbeh, where he was making a map of the excavations for Dr. William Badè, who was excavating the site.33
The most damning information was given in reply to the eighth question: “At what date did he [Higgins] begin the survey at the top of the Megiddo Mound?” Fisher responded by saying that “there was no map started of the hill until April 18th.… Then no more than five days work was done on this map until Mr. Higgins left the expedition [i.e., in mid-June]. All we have to show for this work are a few contour lines covering a small portion of the northeast summit.” In subsequent answers, he noted that Higgins himself had estimated that the summit could have been plotted in three to four weeks of sustained effort, and agreed that the excavations on the top of the mound had been delayed by at least two months because of Mr. Higgins’s failure to complete the promised survey.
Fisher concluded his answers by noting, “Mr. Higgins antagonized every member of the Expedition by constant criticism and cutting remarks, especially at meals,” and that he had alienated the Egyptian workmen in a variety of ways, including letting them know that he suspected them all of being thieves. Just to make certain that there was nothing left to ask, he made the final point that “all the members would have left the Expedition at the end of this season, if not sooner, had Mr. Higgins not been set free.”34
When these answers reached Breasted in mid-August, he instructed Luckenbill to refuse to see Higgins if he appeared in Chicago before Breasted himself returned to the area. And from that day on, nothing more was said about Higgins, apart from a brief mention that he had attempted in July to get two thousand more dollars from the expedition but had been satisfied when they agreed instead to pay the two additional months’ salary (August and September) beyond his year’s contract, the amount he had demanded before leaving Megiddo. Breasted noted ironically to Luckenbill that he also received “a pathetic letter from Mrs. Higgins for whom I feel very sorry. She regards her gifted husband as a prodigy.”35
Higgins died just four years later, in 1930. At the time he was employed as a professor of geology at Lincoln Memorial University, in Tennessee. His obituary noted that he had been ill for several weeks before his death, and that “the doctors say that his death was really due to the long siege of sickness he had in Egypt ten years ago” (which would have been back in about 1920).36
Soon thereafter, new personnel joined the team, including Miss Ruby Woodley, who had previously been the secretary of the British School in Jerusalem. She had worked with Fisher when he was at Beth Shean, as well as earlier, at Thebes in Egypt. Now she came on board at Megiddo in August 1926, at the age of thirty-five, at first as a secretary and general housekeeper. She soon graduated to recorder/registrar, and a good deal of mischief, before departing exactly two years later, in August 1928.37
FIG. 11. Olof Lind, clad in local garb (courtesy of the Oberlin College archives)
Another new hire was a photographer named Mr. Olof Lind, who proved to be an excellent addition to the staff. Lind, whom the Chicago team consistently called Olaf rather than Olof, was a six-foot-tall Swede. Until 1925 or so, he had been a member of the American Colony in Jerusalem, a small Christian utopian community that had originally been established by American expatriates in the 1880s. Olof had been kicked out of the colony and later filed a lawsuit, though he did not win in the end.38 He remained as the photographer of the expedition for a decade, until the end of the 1935–36 season, working for all three successive directors, from Fisher to Guy to Loud. Fisher was very pleased that he was able to hire both of them for less than he had been paying Higgins alone, “so that we get two active workers instead of one, at less cost.”39
Perhaps most importantly for the health of the team, the British Mandate government had finally started to drain the swampy land in the vicinity of Megiddo, laying down terracotta pipes connected to the main drain. Fisher noted, without irony or exaggeration, that the situation had played havoc with them during the season, and that “for the past month, there has not been a day when one or more of the staff have not been in bed. Several times I’ve had to eat alone.”40
Strangely enough, given the reports from the other team members of his bouts of malaria, Fisher claimed to “have escaped remarkably well so far.” According to him, though, “the others have been great sufferers, including Mr. Lind, our new photographer. Now even Miss Woodley, who had been looking after the others, is … seriously ill. Malaria seems to be the main thing, but all of the fellows seem to have some sort of stomach trouble in connection with it. As many as half of the Egyptian workmen were down one or two days. Then we have had fever and typhoid raging in the Jewish colony at Afula and in the villages from which we draw most of our work people.” Regardless, he remained optimistic, stating that “all of these problems at the start make me feel that we are going to have a great deal of good fortune later on.”41
Indeed, by early October, Fisher noted that the health of the staff was much improved, with only Miss Woodley still in the hospital at Haifa, and that the swamp was drying up quickly, so that they should be able to control the malaria in the future.42 However, that would not happen soon enough for Fisher’s nephew Stanley, who had been serving as the expedition’s accountant as well as the chauffeur, in addition to drawing pottery as needed. In early December 1926, he suddenly returned to the United States and then submitted an official resignation on the last day of that month, owing “to ill health.”43 His departure and resignation took place so suddenly that it was not made known to those back in Chicago until late February 1927,44 more than two months later.
The stage was now set for a remarkable change, although neither Fisher nor Breasted knew it at the time. Already at the end of September, Fisher had suggested that they should consider adding to their staff at Megiddo an archaeologist named Philip Langstaffe Ord Guy (generally referred to simply as P.L.O. Guy), who was chief inspector for the Department of Antiquities in British Mandate Palestine but was about to retire. “I wonder if you remember Mr. Guy, the Inspector of Antiquities who was stationed at Jerusalem and Haifa,” Fisher wrote to Breasted. “He is leaving the Government service and would like I feel sure to get back into field work. I have not broached the matter to him, but if you would consider him a useful man, I might try and see if he would join us, and if so, upon what terms.”45
Breasted replied that he didn’t remember ever meeting Guy, but said that Fisher should ask whether Guy would be willing to take charge of the field activities at Megiddo, while Fisher remained in charge of the scientific and archaeological record. Following up shortly thereafter, Breasted asked whether Fisher had been able to get in contact with Guy and “gain some reaction from him about joining the Megiddo staff.”46
However, in contacting Guy, Fisher was unknowingly signing away his own position. Negotiations between Breasted and Guy, for the latter to take over as field director, began as early as the end of December 1926.47