Mr. Hornaday's War (23 page)

When the time came to begin pushing in earnest for the first round of funding for the zoo, Goode and Hornaday were able to enlist the support of two key senators, James Beck of Kentucky and William Allison of Iowa. A bill for an enabling act was drafted and introduced in the Senate on May 2, 1888. It called for the then-extravagant sum of $200,000 to buy 166 acres of Rock Creek Park as a site for the zoo. Langley now agreed to let Hornaday spend part of his official hours trying to sell the idea to Congress, a task for which Hornaday, more than any other man in Washington, was eminently qualified. Hornaday made a detailed relief map of the proposed park, complete with tiny trees and enclosures for the animals, to use as a visual aid for his public relations campaign.

Hornaday tucked his relief map under his arm when he went to testify before the House Committee on Appropriations, which was considering the zoological park bill.
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A little awed by the grand drawing room behind the Speaker's stand where the hearing took place, Hornaday nevertheless made an “eloquent appeal” for the zoo, according to a story in the
Washington Post.
Most of the discussion that followed Hornaday's presentation was positive, though several representatives argued that the proposed zoo would be too expensive and benefit only the people of Washington. One House member, Mississippi Democrat Thomas Stockdale, told a reporter that the zoo “would be of no use to the poor who come to Washington to visit the last of the buffaloes.” The whole idea, he said, “does not sound like republicanism. It echoes like royalty.” When it came to a vote, the zoo bill was voted down, by a vote of 36 in favor, 56 against, with one abstention.

Still, Hornaday was not too terribly worried about this initial defeat because he'd been given a brief tutorial in Washington politics by House member “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, an old Confederate cavalry hero. Wheeler explained that the Democrats had opposed the zoo bill as a part of a complex political ploy, and they'd more than likely pass the amendment the next year. The failure of the zoo amendment, in
other words, had absolutely nothing to do with bison, elk, or moose, and everything to do with power politics in Washington. Fighting Joe was teaching Will Hornaday about the way battles were fought in the capital: rarely was anything what it seemed.

Before the opening of the next session, in December of 1888, “Buffalo Bill” Cody made an extravagant offer: he wanted to give the Department of Living Animals eighteen more buffalo, the third-largest captive herd in existence. But Hornaday had to turn Cody down because there was simply not enough room in the zoo's cramped, temporary quarters. It was a kind of melancholy public relations coup, which Hornaday used to maximum advantage in the press.

For the next session of Congress, a bill for the establishment of a zoological park was introduced in both the House and the Senate at about the same time. Hornaday and his compatriots had enlisted the help of a canny Philadelphia lawyer named Thomas Donaldson.
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Hornaday also was riding a tide of good publicity: most newspapers supported the idea of a National Zoo, even in places like San Francisco and Denver, where the paper's readers would probably never even get to see it. More than a bit surprisingly, among the powerful people who stepped up to support the bill was Langley. In a letter read before the House of Representatives, the Smithsonian head said that a zoological park was needed to serve as “a city of refuge for vanishing races” of animals.

Ultimately, when the measure came to a vote in the House, it sailed through on a vote of 131 to 98. It looked as though Hornaday's vision was going to be realized in record time, and with almost no opposition. But of course, Washington had a few more tricks up its sleeve for Hornaday.

On July 4, 1889, a Zoological Park Commission was created with Hornaday as superintendent and Professor Langley as chairman. Hornaday got the happy task of going down to Rock Creek Park on a series of sunny afternoons to stake out the boundaries of the hoped-for zoo, marker flags snapping merrily in the summer breeze. Here was where the bison enclosure would go, here the deer park, here the monkey house.

He had a new office at the Smithsonian with a temporary sign that said, “Zoological Park Commission” hung on his door. Langley gave him free rein to begin creating the zoo, even though Goode did not want him to give up his work as chief taxidermist, especially because
he was working on several different habitat groups at the time. Although Hornaday was still a relatively young man—only thirty-four years old—he had attained a position of great power and importance in the world of Washington, and of wildlife conservation. In fact, one newspaper reporter, commenting on his qualifications for his new job as zookeeper-in-chief, wrote that Hornaday was “young, energetic, and thoroughly informed of the work expected of him . . . there is probably no other man in America, and few in any other part of the world, whose knowledge of animal life and habits is more extensive than his.”

But the fights and disputes over the zoo's border began almost immediately; and the survey, platting, and negotiations over twelve separate parcels of land that needed to be bought were so contentious that it made Hornaday's head hurt. The theater of war in the battle to save the animals had shifted from the Montana Territory, where the enemies were the hide-hunters, railroads, settlers, and thrill-killers, to the halls of Congress, where the enemies were mind-bogglingly complicated power politics and hidden agendas of all kinds.

Even after Hornaday finally secured title to the last piece of property needed for the zoo, he still needed to secure funding for the project for its first year. Now a bit more seasoned and cynical player in Washington power politics, Hornaday went back to Congress to ask for $92,000 to cover the cost of the current year's operations. It was a startling sum—Dr. Goode was aghast, and Professor Langley, generally about as emotional as a barnacle, was severely shocked. Goode gave Hornaday some sage counsel about the ways of Washington.
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“In Washington, the development of a new institution always moves slowly at first,” he told Hornaday. “By no possibility can you get more than $25,000 now. If you ask for so large a sum as $92,000, you may get nothing. I strongly advise that the amount be made $25,000.”
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Goode, no doubt, did not quite understand that Will Hornaday was the man who had approached his first job as a fifteen-year-old by asking, “What can you do for me?” Boldly was the only way he knew how to operate. Besides, he had worked out the numbers, and the zoo needed $92,000 to pay all its bills for one year, so he decided to ask for $92,000. To Hornaday's surprise, the funding request sailed through the Senate. But in the House, it came up against the scowling countenance of Joseph “Uncle Joe” Cannon, one of the craftiest
and most dominating congressmen ever to serve as Speaker of the House, and a man who had fought the zoo almost every step of the way. Hornaday took his map and argued his case once again for a national zoo to preserve the bison, to assuage the nation's guilt at their near-extermination, and to educate the public. When he was done, he took questions from the congressmen. Not all of them were friendly, but after an hour of sparring, he felt that he had defended his case adequately.

He looked over at Uncle Joe Cannon sitting in his gaudy chair at the head of the chamber. Cannon uncrossed his legs and seemed to look sourly at the carpet.

“Wel-l,” Cannon said, in disgust, “I suppose we'll have to pass this damned bill!” And they did.

It was April 1, 1890, and as Hornaday later described it, the first bill marked the actual creation of the Washington Zoological Park, and this second bill served as its “swaddling clothes.” Once President Benjamin Harrison signed the act, the money became available. The temporary Zoological Park Commission was dissolved, and a new National Zoological Park was created, with Smithsonian secretary Samuel Langley at the top of the flowchart of power.

And that, Hornaday later wrote, is when “some mighty unpleasant things” began to happen.
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Samuel Langley was “a hard man and devilish difficult to get on with,” Hornaday wrote, and in fact, according to Hornaday's telling of the story, ever since Langley's ascension to the job of secretary of the Smithsonian, he had instituted a “quiet reign of terror.”
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Still, Hornaday had found that in the face of conflict or disagreement, Langley was at least frank and fair. Hornaday was willing to put up with him because he was devoted to the glittering vision of a national zoo. But the back-channel whispers at the Smithonian were that “getting along with Secretary Langley is like trying to sleep with a porcupine,” and that Hornaday was the only person on staff who was not afraid of him.
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Within days of the passage of the Act of Congress that finally created the National Zoo, and which placed the whole enterprise under the thumb of Secretary Langley, Hornaday received a letter from Langley that he found both odd and menacing. The letter included the following “Resolution”:

RESOLVED, That all correspondence of this institution with any person or society shall be conducted by the Secretary, and no assistant or employee shall write or receive any official letter or communication pertaining to the affairs of the institution, except under the authority and by the direction of the Secretary; and all such correspondence shall be duly registered and recorded in such manner as the Secretary shall direct.

The whole idea for a national zoo had been Hornaday's to begin with. He and Dr. G. Brown Goode had worked tirelessly and without ego to flesh out the endless details and sell it to Congress; then they'd fought like hellcats to procure the first two rounds of funding. As superintendent of the Zoological Park Commission, Hornaday had envisioned himself as a kind of Noah, overseeing all the breeding pairs of animals from a great ark shipwrecked in Rock Creek Park. Now with this preposterous “Resolution,” he was knocked down to the role of a mere “employee,” or even a child, someone vaguely untrustworthy who needed to be supervised and controlled lest he do something brash, foolish, or even illegal. To Langley, the resolution might have seemed a legitimate clarification of Hornaday's subordinate role; but to the proud Hornaday, it felt like an insufferable comeuppance.

This new resolution, with its implied suspicion and complete reordering of Hornaday's universe, worried him in the extreme. He decided to pay a visit to the secretary. That was Hornaday's nature. He did not know how to simply accept his fate, like a condemned man on the gallows; all he knew how to do was fight like mad to fashion his
own
fate. According to Hornaday's later account, Langley received him in his vast upstairs office in the Smithsonian tower “with set mouth and hostile eye . . . the secretarial atmosphere was charged with electricity.”
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The whole preliminary plan for the national zoo, which had been worked out in painstaking detail over the course of several years with apparent cordiality, now was completely scrapped. Hornaday had laid out plans for huge, natural enclosures, taking advantage of Rock Creek Park's stony outcrops and ancient trees so that zoogoers could catch glimpses of the animals in something like their natural habitat. It was a revolutionary model for a zoo, and later it would be imitated around the world. But to this notion, Langley said coldly, “I have no intention of doing that,” with his mouth so tightly set he seemed to be nipping off the ends of words.

Referring to one choice piece of the proposed grounds, Langley told Hornaday:
No portion of that property will be given up to animals
—
all of it will be kept as the private grounds of the park administration.

Open to visitors?

No. It will not be open to visitors.

Multiple entrances?

There will be no entrance down the Adams Mill Road.

A scenic bridge across Rock Creek?

There will be no bridge across the river, except on the Quarry Road.
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All these supposedly controversial details had been specified in Hornaday's original plan—and approved by Langley.

Slap after slap, rebuff after rebuff, Langley seemed determined not so much to create a great zoo as to make sure that
he
was in charge of it—down to the tiniest detail. But all the foregoing paled in comparison to Langley's final revelation. He told Hornaday that he had appointed a committee of three men from the National Museum, who would take charge of the development of the zoological park and “control” Hornaday's activities, because Langley “had no time” to control them himself. Hornaday knew very well that two of these men—Major John Wesley Powell and Frederick True, curator of mammals at the Smithsonian and Hornaday's former boss—were “hostiles,” who could simply overrule the other committee member, Dr. Goode, who was a friend. The committee was effectively stacked against him. And furthermore, Langley went on—as if this were not enough—Hornaday's job as superintendent would be only “provisional.” Once a suitable director of the National Zoo was found, the committee would be dissolved, and Hornaday would serve as the new director's assistant.

Assistant!

Hornaday was being demoted from chief visionary and director of the national zoo to cage-cleaner and janitor. William Temple Hornaday was a man who had been born on a farm in the middle of nowhere, without wealth or any particular advantages in life, and he had battled his way to a position of power and prominence in the nation's capital by means of grit, determination, and the glittering zeal of a visionary. He was a fighter down to his fingernails, but this kind of fighting—Washington fighting—was utterly confounding to him. Was the enemy Langley, or was there a person or persons behind him who had set this up? If so, why? And what was the best way to fight back? It was as if he were being stabbed in the back, but when he turned to see who was wielding the knife, they had disappeared.