Locust (18 page)

In recounting events on the day of prayer, Riley later told the tale of having come upon a farm in Warrensburg that had escaped the first waves of locusts. He advised the owner to dig ditches around the field to save his crop. In Riley’s words, “[The farmer’s] piety exceeded his good sense, however, and instead of genuflecting on a spade he was performing the operation in another way, while his beautiful vineyard was being destroyed at so speedy a rate that it would not show a green leaf by the morrow. I respect every man’s faith, but there are instances where I would respect his work a good deal more.”

Riley’s public opposition to reliance on divine intervention put him at odds with some of the clergy. He was taken to task by Reverend Doctor W. Pope Yeaman of the Third Baptist Church of St. Louis, who accused Riley of ridiculing religion. Riley’s limited capacity for tact had apparently been exhausted in his letter to the newspaper, so his retort to Rev. Yeaman was rather more direct:

Riley was even more outraged by the claims of church leaders that the locusts were “a chastisement of the Lord [for] wickedness, fraud, falsehood, and corruption [which] abound in every department of society.” Bristling with indignation, he asserted, “The expression of such opinions is a downright insult to the hard-working, industrious and suffering farmers of the Western country, who certainly deserve no more to be thus visited by Divine wrath than the people of other parts of the State and country.”

Riley was a complicated man, a mixture of art and science, faith and facts, idealism and pragmatism, ego and altruism. Perhaps the one quality that failed to have a counterpoint was ambition. And so, he did not hesitate to leap at the opportunity to chair the first U.S. Entomological Commission. He knew that he could handle the political conflicts, and he relished public exposure. However, he had never worked as an equal, let alone a superior, to first-rate scientists. Cyrus Thomas and Alpheus Packard were no threat to Riley’s ascendancy to power, but they amplified his dreaded companion, the demon of insecurity.

 

Many scientists are haunted by uncertainty as to their talents, skills, and insights. These insecurities are fed by traditions of elitism based on the status of one’s alma mater and mentor. This self-doubt is further exacerbated by the harsh system of peer review, which reached an apogee of nastiness in some of the scientific debates in the 1800s. Although we must here step across the line of historical objectivity (presuming one exists in the first place), what we know of Riley’s life, combined with his subtle hints and circumstantial evidence, suggests that the Entomological Commission was a less-than-cordial trio of great minds and strong personalities. For Riley, the tensions seemed most intense with regard to his lifelong efforts to cast himself as both a brilliant scholar grounded in intellectual thought and an expert practitioner rooted in pragmatic experience. The presence of Packard and Thomas threatened to belie these idealized images.

Riley prominently displayed his adopted titles and academic credentials, referring to himself as “Professor” and invariably noting his Doctor of Philosophy degree (dispensing with the “honorary” qualifier). He even listed himself as having a Master of Arts, although the origin of this degree is not evident from the historical record. But this allowed him to create the coveted string of accolades when presenting himself as “Charles V. Riley, M.A., Ph.D., State Entomologist of Missouri; Chief of the U.S. Entomological Commission, Lecturer of Entomological in Various Colleges; Author of ‘Potato Pests,’ etc.” The academic status to which Riley aspired through his constructed pedigree was exemplified by Alpheus Packard.

“Alpha” Packard was born into intellectual privilege. His father held a doctor of divinity degree and was professor of Greek and Latin
at Bowdoin College; his mother was the daughter of the college’s president. Packard might well have been a threat to Riley’s political ambitions, if not for a lifelong reticence in public speech. Packard had been born with a cleft palate, which caused a speech defect and engendered a pattern of shyness. Although the deformity had been corrected by an anesthesia-free operation when he was eighteen, Packard’s diffidence was firmly entrenched.

Like Riley, as a teen Packard became a keen collector of natural objects, including shells and insects, and soon became quite accomplished in artistically depicting his finds. He devoured Bowdoin’s books on natural history and entered the college at eighteen. After graduating, he began studies with Louis Agassiz, the renowned Harvard zoologist. Packard’s affiliation with Agassiz surely sowed the seeds for future conflicts with Riley, for Agassiz was one of the most strident and powerful adversaries of Charles Darwin. Darwin argued that new species arose via natural selection, which operated to favor the survival and reproduction of those forms that were most successful in meeting the challenges of an ever-changing set of conditions. Agassiz found little evidence of such gradual change of life forms in the fossil record, although he admitted that entirely new species often appeared in geological time. As such, he resorted to a hybridization of creationism and science:

Packard had previously been impressed with the writings of Jean-Baptist Lamarck, whose theory of evolution was based on the notion that environmental factors and biological need caused organisms to change. These changes were then passed to the offspring through what became known as “the inheritance of acquired characteristics.” For example, a giraffe’s neck became incrementally longer by its reaching high into the trees for food. The elongated neck achieved through a life of stretching was then passed on to the offspring as their starting point in the next generation. Lamarck’s theory was perceived as being counter to Darwin’s, although Darwin made some use of his adversary’s notions because they provided a means for rapid change—and neither the age of the earth nor the mechanism of genetic inheritance was yet known to the scientific community. Given Agassiz’s opposition to Darwin, based on an odd amalgamation of religion and paleontology, he found Packard to be a welcome ally. Indeed, Packard would later write a biography entitled “Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution.” Riley had derived considerable intellectual status from his association with Darwin, and so evolution became not only a flash point within society but a sore point within the U.S. Entomological Commission.

Packard’s personality was also rather contrary to Riley’s. The former was variously described as, “fair, modest, retiring, and dignified . . . kind and courteous . . . entirely honorable, and never forgot to give credit for assistance of any kind to younger men, in a day when this was by no means invariably the custom.” In short, he had few qualities in common with Riley. Although he was unassuming, Packard also had “a tremendous spirit when roused to anger.” And who could provoke this quiet man? Authoritarians. Along with the other assistants in Harvard’s museum, Packard revolted against Agassiz’s strict discipline and low pay, a situation that came to open rebellion when a new regulation decreed that assistants could not have private collections—all of their material was to be given to the museum. Although Packard left Cambridge over this conflict, he remained on good terms with Agassiz, a testament to the young man’s conciliatory ways. But Packard surely bristled under the leadership of Riley, who was even more impolitic than Agassiz.

In 1864, Packard earned his bachelor’s degree from the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and his M.D. from the Maine Medical
School. He then received a commission as Assistant Surgeon of the First Maine Veteran Volunteers. During his service in the Civil War, Packard saw stiff action in Virginia and won a commendation for bravery. And so not only was he a graduate of the oldest and most elite university in the country, he was something of a war hero. Riley’s degrees were honorary distinctions from an embryonic university in the Midwest, and his war service consisted of standing guard duty.

After the war, Packard published an impressive series of works on natural history and traveled to Europe to meet a bevy of famous scientists. By October 1876, when the western governors were meeting in Omaha, Packard had already published the standard textbook of entomology and had just completed work with one of Hayden’s surveys. Packard was well on his way to becoming one of the foremost zoologists in the country. And in his role as state entomologist of Massachusetts, he had recently expressed concern that economic entomology in the United States was lagging far behind that in Europe. So, who better to ensure the scientific veracity and intellectual credibility of the country’s first Entomological Commission?

Packard might have trumped his chief’s academic record, but Riley had an ace in the hole. He had the high ground in terms of authentic connections to rural life: Riley had been a farmer. Having worked the land, Riley had firsthand experience and a devotion to agriculture that Packard could not assert, had he been the sort to make self-serving claims. Although degrees and diplomas were fine, Riley had devoted his career to applied entomology, and he was intimately familiar with the struggles of the farmer. But then there was Cyrus Thomas.

 

Thomas had led a Lincolnesque life. His earthiness was rooted in rural Tennessee and village schools, far from Riley’s gentrified London and art academies. Born in Kingsport, nestled between the Appalachian and Great Smoky Mountains, Thomas never went to college but studied math, science, and law on his own. The gifted young man was admitted to the Illinois bar at the age of twenty-six and practiced law in Murphysboro on the banks of the Big Muddy River. Comfortable in his legal practice, Thomas decided to expand his horizons and sought a branch of science in which to carve a niche for himself. Having come from rural obscurity, he aspired to fame—and
entomology was his ticket. Thomas, an exemplar of pragmatism, reckoned that the study of insects was eminently affordable and the objects of interest were invariably close at hand.

Despite the calculated practicality of Thomas’s decision, he was soon motivated by an authentic sense of excitement and accomplishment. He loved contributing articles on economic entomology and published his first paper while still practicing law. Thomas soon found chasing insects far more to his liking than pursuing litigants, and he emerged as a potent and respected force in the field of science. With his penchant for legal debate, Thomas entered the fray in various entomological controversies, including the infamous brouhaha over the armyworm’s biology (recall the nasty argument between Benjamin Walsh and John Klippart in the nation’s agricultural press). However, his real strength was in collaboration rather than argumentation. Thomas is widely acclaimed for having laid the foundation for the Illinois Natural History Survey, serving as its catalyst and first curator. Having flourished for 145 years, this survey constitutes the nation’s largest and most successful such venture. With more than 200 scientists and staff, including 22 economic entomologists, Thomas’s legacy represents one of the finest ecological research units in the modern world.

Although there is no record of Thomas’s role in the Civil War, this was a period of dramatic personal transformation. With the death of his wife in 1864, Thomas quit the practice of law and became an evangelical Lutheran minister. But his “intense independence of thought” did not predispose him for a long career in religion, so he abandoned this profession for his lifelong calling—science. However, his theological training was not so easily deserted and caused him to struggle with the emerging theory of evolution. In recounting a discussion with a minister-naturalist colleague, he quipped, “You can imagine the scene: these two ex-ministers of the Gospel, having the advantage over other members of the cloth in being naturalists, puzzling their brains in the effort to harmonize the facts of nature with the teachings of the church.” Later colleagues characterized his position as being theologically nuanced but generally supportive of evolutionary theory. Yet Riley would have none of it. In reviewing the biology of the Rocky Mountain locust, Riley considered the possibility of gradual changes
between generations and caustically asserted, “The same possibility has also been suggested by Prof. Thomas—a professed anti-Darwinian—in an elaborate paper published in October, 1875.”

Whatever his stand on evolution, Thomas was able to recommence his scientific studies and soon returned to prominence. Like Riley, Thomas’s academic credentials were unconventional but served his purpose. He was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by Gettysburg College and was appointed professor of natural sciences at Southern Normal University in Carbondale, Illinois. The following year, Thomas was appointed as the third state entomologist of Illinois (after Benjamin Walsh’s death, William LeBaron had served in this capacity until his own untimely and unusual death due to sunstroke). The state, however, was too beggarly to provide him with anything more than a salary, thereby vindicating his choice of entomology as a science that could be productively pursued on a shoestring. Lacking the capacity for practical fieldwork, he devoted his labors to taxonomy. Thomas’s accomplishments were noteworthy and landed him a position as entomologist on Hayden’s survey in 1873.