DRAFT TREATMENT - University of Michigan
Current Treatment: A point of departure for the conference of scholars and for use of the humanities Scriptwriting Grant
Act One America’s external reach, and internal racial challenges
Jerimi Suri, Historian President Theodore Roosevelt's life ends in 1919 at age sixty. Had he not died so young, he might have become as potent a principal in international conservation as he had been in America.
The First World War comes to a close and the Treaty of Versailles lays the foundation for a new experiment: the League of Nations. Historians previously viewed the 1920s as a period of precarious prosperity and isolationism. The decade is now regarded as one of new diplomacy aimed at the economic and cultural exportation of American goods and technology.
America's role as an imperial power in a newly variegated colonial world, forged through trade and technology, has begun.
Roosevelt sacrificed his favorite son in combat; and saw two others severely wounded--some say Roosevelt died of a broken heart.
Gregg Mitman, Historian His son, Kermit, joins Roosevelt on the 1909 African Safari and on his most dangerous journey, the Amazonian River of Doubt expedition in 1914. Kermit, along with his older brother, Teddy Jr., inherits their father's passion for exploration.
Narrator Born in Boston in 1904, Harold Jefferson Coolidge was the great great great grandson of President Jefferson. Enabled by his Brahmin pedigree, he shares the Roosevelt boys’ fondness for what he called ‘the life out of doors’ and indulges it at the family retreat at Squam Lake.
Pix: from Coolidge family archives at Squam Lake
Narrator: As an adult, he will join Kermit in leading the first American scientific expedition to Indo-China. But like the boys’ father, ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, he’s a frail child, and eager to develop himself both physically and morally through the rigors of manly activity, but also bookish, and intellectually inclined.
Nancy Steppan, Historian: Lawyer Madison Grant had long been a close friend of Teddy Roosevelt’s. Grants’ evolutionary trajectory ranks each race by the fineness, and whiteness, of their features and by ‘Nordic’ measures of cultural finesse. Both he and Roosevelt were trophy hunters and founders of the Boone and Crockett Club for the control of hunting in New York State wilderness areas, which Coolidge would later join.
Hammonds Grant's interests in conservationism and eugenics are intertwined; both assume the need for stewardship and so there are key analogies that animate both. For instance, eliminating “undesirables” from social communities is akin to ridding a nature preserve of poachers. In his famed The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, he portrays the patrician class as he does an endangered species, in need of protection as the redwoods, the bison, or Glacier National Park--all of which he, and Roosevelt, worked to defend.
Rebecca Hardin, anthropologist: In 1904, the year Coolidge was born, Grant got wind of a young man who had been brought from the Congo for the World’s Fair. Ota Benga, the young man in question, came from the same broad culture group as the Batwa forest guides who would lead Coolidge in his Gorilla hunt in the Congo twenty years later. Such hunts would, in turn, contribute specimens for display in fairs and museums.
Steppan It is an age of exhibits, and emerging science. Thousands of visitors thronged the American Museum of Natural History in New York every day--attendance there tops the movie houses. The minds and the money behind it are also from this same social circle: Kermit Roosevelt serves as a trustee for the AMNH, Grant serves on their Board. It is thus not so surprising that the “The Second International Congress of Eugenics” is hosted there in 1921.
Hardin: Many from this same circle of patrons from the AMNH concomitantly establish the New York Zoological Park, with Grant as its Secretary. He urges the zookeepers to feature Ota Benga there as “The Pygmy in the Zoo.” Benga, who had been a long term assistant and associate to missionary John Philips Verner, had been staying at the Museum. But the stress of his situation starts to show; at one point, he tosses a chair at philanthropist Florence Guggenheim narrowly missing her. Once relocated to the Zoo, he at first roams the exhibits as a helper, until somehow, every afternoon, he can be found on display in the Monkey House. To the attendant outcry from African American and other social activist communities, Grant responds coolly in terms that make clear his own views on the hierarchy of races, and show that he was blind to his own savagery vis a vis this visitor who had chosen to visit the U.S. from another part of the world in order to see—not to be seen.
Donna Haraway, Historian Philosopher Two decades later, as Coolidge sets sail as an aide de camp with the Harvard Medical Expedition for Africa, Henry Fairfield Osborn, the paleontologist, is President of the Museum of Natural History. A fervent eugenicist, he breaks ground for the Hall of the Age of Man. The children who visit the exhibit, he declares, will "become more reverent, more truthful, and more interested in the simple and natural laws of their being…
Narrator: Coolidge came of age when scientific attitudes toward race buttressed colonialism abroad and Jim Crow at home. As a scion of Boston and North Shore society, Coolidge also grows up in a nation giving birth to major social movements against such racialized social control. As early as 1906 we see days of race riots in Atlanta that bring white and black political leaders to the negotiating table in unprecedented ways. By 1919, the year of President Roosevelt’s demise, the adolescent Coolidge lives in an urban America in the throes of a backlash; against blacks and black culture, foreign ideology and foreign workers. (PIX; 1919-20 Race riots in Chicago and Philadelphia, white gangs versus black strike breakers, anti-Bolshevik police raids, Klan meetings, lynching)
Jerimi Suri, Historian At the same time, more young Americans than ever before are also going out into the world as a part of passage to adulthood. Coolidge is fifteen when Teddy Roosevelt dies, too young to have the chance to prove his manhood in the trenches of an overseas war. Instead, he embraces world travel and trophy hunting, where post-war commercial and political elites forged their best business relationships ‘Hal’s’ uncle, Archibald Coolidge, teaches him to hunt in the New Hampshire hills.
Thomas Borstelmann, Historian Uncle ‘Archie’ is not only a mentor in matters of sports, however. He founds the Council on Foreign Relations, personally overseeing a pivotal study on post-war overseas business prospecting. The Council's vision centers on the development of American commerce, science, and culture in the incoming President Wilson's New World Order. Industry, and with it, urbanization, reaches new intensity across the western world, drawing the U.S. into new relationships across the globe At the same time, in 1923, the Eugenicists triumphed when the US passed restrictive immigration laws to protect the “Race”.
Narrator: Coolidge’s travels on scientific expeditions to distant lands and his encounters with local peoples in Central Africa and Indochina reflected this believe that not all cultures, or peoples were equal. (PIX Coolidge’s scrawled diaries, artifacts from his journeys) As little more than a child himself during this troubled, and troubling era, Coolidge believes, as did Roosevelt, that Darwinian evolution places the Anglo-Saxon race on top of the pillar of modern civilization. He would later argue, as a major founder of the first global parks and endangered species systems, that international conservation needed guidance from what he termed “the Anglo Saxon races.” Coolidge would take the concept of national parks into truly international terrain, in a way Teddy Roosevelt might have applauded. But first, Coolidge would spend his next years hunting big game in Africa and Asia, forming particular memories, and bonds with his prey. In fact, he would journey through another 30 years before coming to re-examine linkages between the Eugenicist ideas of his youth, and the expansion of commerce, hunting, and international conservation.
Act 2 The Expeditions Begin
Suri Like his Uncle Archibald, Coolidge intends to be a diplomat. But he sets off on a career twisting adventure that would start him on a path to a hybrid career: The Scientific Diplomat, in essence trading in the hot new commodities of anatomy, biology, and tropical nature as a universal patrimony and as a leisure product. Following his freshman year, Coolidge, at the age of 21, follows the American Biological Survey and hunts brown bear on Admiralty Island off the Alaskan coast. He is exuberant.
V.O Excerpt from Harold Coolidge Diaries and letters home with archival footage to match…I miss all my little jobs I used to do, so every time you stub your toe on a nail in the wharf, do wish me back to Squam Lake as hard as I sometimes do. I wouldn't exchange the marvelously selfish summer I'm having for anything.
Author, John Howe: Stories about Coolidge’s guide, Allen Hasselborg, circulated in adventure magazines and amongst zoologists. Hasselborg was a first-class bear hunter, a poster boy for the last frontier where manliness could be reclaimed. As his respect for the great brown bears increases, his interest in killing them declines. This was Teddy Roosevelt country, the kind of place he, too, would fight to conserve.
Narrator With hunting in the name of science now on his resume and a family footing the bill, Coolidge’s chance to travel to Africa came in 1926. He was invited to join the Dr. Strong’s Harvard Medical Expedition to Liberia and the Belgian Congo as an assistant mammalogist.(PIX Porters, tipois, marching and flags, palpations of village children and microscopes sket up under canvas tents)
Narrator In 1927 the expedition is launched with high fanfare typical of the period. (PIX Newspaper headlines: “The story of the Harvard expedition, whose eight members left Boston today en route to the African west coast … may, when written, prove an epic saving millions of lives”, Animated Maps)
Coolidge Expedition Diaries w/ matching footage
The great adventure has really begun. The dream of my childhood is becoming a reality and I am off for the West African coast. (PIX Expedition footage shows the steamship being precariously offloaded onto Liberian whale boats upon arrival in Monrovia, Liberia. )
A soft singing drifted back from the bow. I could hardly distinguish the black shapes huddling there but I became very conscious of the wonderful harmony of their native songs that now followed one after another. They rose and fell like an ocean swell and all in keeping with the scene.. There were no harsh notes, no discords. The world of jazz had been replaced by a Bacarole.
Narrator Founded by slaves repatriating to Africa in 1821, Liberia was not directly under colonial rule. America and its race politics in the 1920s had not prepared Coolidge for Monrovia…
Lal & I descended on Kru Town armed with a battery of cameras. We were immediately surrounded by a swarm of small naked black children who do sports on the beach for the movies. We wandered thru dusty little narrow streets of thatched houses, like pied pipers - a mob of cheering monkeys in our wake…On our way back to the dock, we saw the market place down on the beach below us. Just a mass of moving blacks making funny sounds. Their language is more of sounds than talk…The blacks are filthy and clothed in all color and shape of garments from the latest London fashion to almost nothing at all. The women have flat noses, big chins, thick lips, and are much more ugly than our Negroes.
Hardin: Coolidge’s comments about Liberians are shocking, dehumanizing. There can be no excuse for them. In some ways they reflect the views of his powerful compatriots such as Grant and Roosevelt; in other ways they reflect the naive fear on both sides of these colonial encounters. At this time, Europeans still know so little about Africans, and Africans still know so little about Europeans.
Narrator Rebounding from the culture shock, Coolidge is frustrated by the experience of clearing customs, a process that has them in Monrovia for weeks…
Liberia is probably the most backward of any country in the world that pretends to be civilized. Monrovia is crowded with corrupt government officials, most of them with titles, pay, and no work to do.
Conservationist, Alexander Peal (Liberian): …and this is why awareness is important. In those days no one explained anything to anybody. Everything was forced, you put your whims and your leadership on what you wanted to see happen.
Coolidge diary entry, with matching footage: One old fellow had a clay pipe snatched from his mouth and smashed on the ground by a government messenger. A box was put on the man's head and a rawhide whip applied unsparingly…
Narrator The diplomatic and political science journal that his Uncle Archibald Coolidge had launched is widely read throughout Liberia, to Coolidge’s delight. I am surprised and pleased to find in Monrovia in the hands of government officials at least five copies of the same issue of Foreign Affairs. They all read it eagerly here and like it too.
Rebecca Hardin Anthropologist Coolidge’s journey’s and encounters with wild lands were in tension with the development of global industries and the rise of the modern. Attitudes about nature were also changing, and new ideas about the scarcity of natural resources were beginning to circulate. All this as fresh ecosystems were being discovered and documented, nature tamed and transformed, harnessed to the growth of nations and new economies. The rubber boom, which reached its peak in the wake of World War I, was a remarkable example of such changes, and one of the most brutal from the point of view of human suffering…
Historian, Carl Patrick Burrowes (Liberian): As the expedition is arriving, Firestone Plantations offers a bailout loan to the Liberian government for five million dollars. Firestone, in return, receives a million acres of land to put under rubber production for 99 years, a tenth of Liberia’s arable land. In addition, Firestone gets an agreement for labor that the government will conscript from indigenous tribes.
Coolidge is conflicted… A vein of Sympathy is aroused in me when I see the total slavery exercised by the Liberian government in driving the natives. They chain them together with great iron collars and steel chains.
Hardin: The loan has Liberian officials beholden to the company. There’s tension between white businessmen and the largely black Americo-Liberian government elites.
Firestone hosts, mentors and informs the Harvard expeditionists. The whispered gossip over dinner at the President’s house as they wait for clearance further exposes the young Coolidge to local expatriate attitudes and mannerisms.
…The government collects revenue by taxing the white man with exorbitant fines for very petty offenses. A white is not allowed to touch a black, and if he does, he is liable to a fifty-dollar fine. This makes it hard for the few white traders.
Peal. I think at the time the government should have shown some respect for its own people, its own culture and giving the visitors or the strangers some kind of demonstration that - look these are our people.
We came to many abandoned towns where the people fled into the bush just to escape the misbehaving of government officials, which to them means absolute slavery.
Narrator The medical team is relieved to get to work…
We then went down to operate a clinic in Kru Town. Mr. Wollo (a Liberian student from Harvard) was with us and a great help. Dr. Shattuck and the others set up their instruments on two boxes in a large native square surrounded by straw thatches. Small boys and girls swarmed to them to have their spleens felt, blood taken from their ears, ulcers dressed, etc. They thought it was a great game and many tried to get treated twice… Congenital syphilis, itch, malaria and other diseases found. Lal and I took movies about the town as well as of the medical work.
Hardin: The burgeoning fields of tropical medicine and natural history are closely linked; fieldwork involves collecting, taxonomy, and anatomical study. Even as an intern, Coolidge would exhibit innate skills as an organizer and he could hunt and get others to hunt for him. His travels were all part of the formation of the new breed of scientific diplomat he was to become.
Narrator Coolidge searches for specimens, in the markets as well as in the bush…
It mews like a cat, and is a Pigmy Royal antelope - reported but never collected from Liberia. It is only 5 inches high...a valuable new mammal for us having all the characteristics of the adult except horns. I paid the man 2 shillings and he was delighted. I then came back here and chloroformed my darling little antelope to have him go in his last little box.
Narrator Coolidge adopts colonialist style behavior, he “toughens up” as the expedition with its gear and entourage pushes deeper into the interior. During their travels they met many different types of communities, and depended heavily on the material and political support of their chiefs. Some chiefs were even women:
(Pix with matching diary entries of Sua Koko’s stronghold, with her subjects weaving, working, with fat babies and an air of rural prosperity).
Peal: Sua Koko was legendary; my grandparents used to tell stories of her when I was a child. She was more powerful than many men!
Coolidge, Expedition Diary: I will never forget Sua Koko. When she sat on the crate of gin we had brought as a gift for her, her breasts reached nearly down to her knees.
Narrator: Throughout Liberia, tribal chiefs demand money in exchange for supplying manual labor.
We showed all our carriers what a shilling looked like and assured them they would each have one when we got to Wia. This cheered a great many who, I am sure, the chief had never told about the shilling they were to receive.
Narrator Since the chief keeps all of the funds, there is little incentive for porters to remain, except of course, coercion…
…I resumed my old exercise of porter pushing and the carriers got more and more tired and sulky. They stopped very often and this made lots of trouble for me, as I had to wait, and to the headman, who had to lift up the 60-lb. loads. I was good and tired and very much aggravated when I came to a stream within 200 feet of Zigga town (our destination) to find half a dozen porters in bathing, their loads on the roadside. Any white man who carried a load all day and had 200 feet to go would never stop to rest and swim just before getting his job done.
About 500 yards out we found two loads abandoned in the trail...but Lal stopped the whole safari as three more loads had been abandoned. What to do? We decided to rope together as many men as possible in bunches of twos and threes. This would make it less easy for them to run away. I cut up all the laundry rope I had into lengths and we used the native rope (vines) to help out. We tied the men about the waist but couldn't make it tight or it would stop circulation.
Peal : Seeing Coolidge or other white man in the area, residents of the regions they entered must have felt that there was trouble. Every time they saw a white man they felt it was trouble, because their people were used to the desire of a white man to persecute them.
…I took the lantern and shone it on the barrel of my rifle and then on the drummers. They understood my sign language, stopped at once and fled…I cursed the musicians soundly, and said a lot about white man’s right to sleep…
Narrator Sometimes Coolidge’s methods were softer…
For a long time they walked very slowly until at last I told them I would sing a song if they would {speed up.} Afterwards I sang the Marseillaise and they seemed pleased. They then sang a long chorus and immediately began to walk twice as fast. The ice was broken and when they weren't singing, I was.
Mitman Racial prejudices from the U.S., however, constantly reared their head in Coolidge’s interactions. They had been reinforced for him in the popular travelogue-expedition films of the period. (PIX Johnson’s Simba; Winstead’s Ingagi). And they were powerfully linked in that newly industrialized capitalist society, with fears of other kinds, for instance, of Marxism and Bolshevism…
.…Lal and I were looking for men when I saw about a dozen and 15 women coming up the road from the town…I then went back and Lal and I got our boys to go out and stop them so they could carry for us. I got my Mannlicher (M91)rifle; we managed to stop the whole crowd …Immediately I was faced by a tall, fierce looking Mandingo in a long blue robe…In broken English, he said these were his people and pushed me aside…Dr. Strong ordered me to bring him up to our house. He resisted, so I slid his arm into a wristlock and he came along without trouble. His people followed him. When we got inside the compound, we read him the government order. …he started a long spiel about our cuffing, kicking and killing him, about this being a Black Man's country and what was our business, just a torrent of abuse and the worst sort of Bolshevism, even calling our own boys fools for working for us…
Narrator After extensive overland trekking through Liberia, (Pix Maps) the expedition reaches the Firestone plantation.
We stopped a moment & saw a native village with the Firestone's Supervisor’s house nearby on a little hill like a feudal lord. The great forest is as bare as a good lumbering job in the U.S. & between the stumps in straight lines are sticks, cuttings of rubber trees already planted…Some of the latex is coagulated & smoked without pressing or Firestone stamping. This kind looks like great hunks of pig iron as it goes out. Already Firestone has taken $400,000 worth of rubber out of Liberia.
Narrator Coolidge is thrilled to be out in the remote areas, where he is able to hunt and get away from the larger townships…
Native boys came down & carried our stuff up on their heads & we found our tents all pitched for us. Tin plates & cups, a table out of doors, marvelous cocoa, a full moon - life is worth living now.
Narrator There is ample room for each scientist to have his own laboratory, and both the naturalist and the medical research proceeds apace.
Historian, Gregg Mitman The United States had long watched on the sidelines as England and France made a fortune through rubber concessions. But this was the New World Order. Anything was possible. In Liberia, Firestone’s in-kind sponsorship provides access and means for the medical team. Throughout the tropical belt, colonial officials and entrepreneurs were losing workers, soldiery, and explorers to sleeping sickness, malaria, and all sorts of infectious and parasitic diseases. Once the tents are set up, the medical entourage conducts curative work and collects insects and takes human and animal blood and tissue samples. Firestone officials appreciate their research as a progressive step towards a healthier workforce.
Narrator Coolidge was off to hunt specimens...
…I spent much of the day cleaning skulls, salting hides and putting the tents to air, doing camp chores. I tried to get some more hunting men and sent to Sua Koko for her bow and arrow and cap gun hunters to help us…I was pretty discouraged when I came back to camp having killed 2 monkeys and brought in only one snake. But it turned out that the blood and parasites of the snake were very interesting and he was a new kind for our collection, really quite valuable.
Narrator While the medical group draws blood and dresses ulcers, Coolidge’s group concentrates on animal taxonomy. They explore savanna, rain forest, and mangrove. Animal specimens are collected and cured; hide and bones are shipped back to Harvard.
When I reached camp, I had a mushroom (fungus) and a beautiful vine for Dave, a snail shell and a bug for Dr. Bequaert, a monkey for Dr. Allen and myself. In the monkey Theiler found a new parasite - never before described - which is a beauty and he may name it after me. I get a lot of satisfaction every time I write my name on a tag indicating that I have collected it. Each animal is my new addition to vast world of scientific knowledge to which so many men devote their lives. It is very pleasing to make tangible contributions that you know are of value, even if they be few.
Richard Wrangham, Anthropologist Collectors believed that with so little known about tropical flora and fauna, collecting as many specimens as humanly possible was a vital step in the quest for scientific knowledge. Without a wide sampling of a particular species, developing a complete taxonomic chart was difficult, for within each species there was tremendous variation, especially from site to site.
Narrator Following their field expedition, they layover in Monrovia. Coolidge is introduced to Harvey Firestone and the rest of the clan, including the father of last year’s Harvard football captain, the high strung Mr. Cheek.
… we had champagne and marvelous food with Mrs. Willis, Mrs. Ross and Mrs. Firestone (a very good-looking, simple-natured blonde from Ohio). I was still weak from fever but when the Victrola played Valencia, I couldn't resist one dance with her… One morning Mr. Cheek, Dr. George (Shattuck) and I planned to go quail shooting very early. We were up at 4:30 and ready to leave at 5, but no car. We waited until 6 for the nigger driver. Mr. Cheek was very mad. When I went out the gate, I found him physically punishing the driver who had at last arrived. Dr. George was holding the fellow from escaping. Shortly the man was released, not much the worse for his licking, and got the car out.
... there was a tap on the door. I opened it and a policeman asked for Mr. Cheek, (who) was paraded to jail followed by a jeering crowd with shouts of handcuff him and many other similar things anti-Firestone, anti-American and underneath, anti-white man. All this because of the law that a white man can't touch a black. I sent a boy with some breakfast to the jail for Dr. Shattuck and Mr. Cheek.
… the embassy got busy and cables soon started flying to Washington…All this went on just as the question of a large money loan from America was before the legislature. This loan was guaranteed by Mr. Firestone personally. Liberia needed the money badly and probably will accept it because she couldn't get money anywhere else. I hope President Coolidge takes firm and aggressive action or a white man's life won't be worth much out here…
Narrator Coolidge had had enough of Liberia and was more than ready to move on to other field sites.
…Its history is a series of failures, resulting from misguided policies of well-meaning people. With the progress of the world in the direction away from primitive forms of barbarianism and slavery, Liberia has been left out.
But as Coolidge moved on, Liberia itself remained a site of struggle. In 1930, The League of Nations appointed the International Commission of Inquiry to investigate allegations of slavery in Liberia with repercussions that continue until this day.
…At last people are beginning to look back on and pay attention to what is called by some “ The Land That God Forgot,” and by others, “ The White Man's Grave.” This part of the west coast of Africa so many years behind the times is like a thorn in the paw of a great world animal.
Act 3 The Great White Hunter in the Congo
Narrator The Harvard Medical Expedition moves on to the Belgian Congo, the idealized proving grounds of Teddy Roosevelt. (Pix Maps)
Steppans Coolidge is quite taken by the Congo. It’s a Belgian colony, has clearer race and class lines, all closer to the ‘pre-contact’ hunter’s paradise he longs for.
…The Congo is like a beautiful being of many moods and all of them are soft and gentle, there is not harshness anywhere… There are great trees 200 feet tall with long vines and creepers hanging like beautiful clothes from the highest branches all the way down to the roots, or trailing in the river below… I went alone for a walk in the full moonlight and found about 200 natives doing a dance in the moonlight in a town some distance back from the river…I felt that they all belonged to me. Before I left I flashed my searchlight in their eyes and they were as delighted as a lot of kids. This is all such a contrast to Boston or New York, with the curse of civilization, bad liquor, painted women and an age of jazz.
Narrator Traveling upriver by steamer, the Expedition establishers a semi-permanent base camp in the highlands of the upper Congo. Local hunters assist with the collecting. Coolidge compares the scene to a Chicago meat-packing plant…
…when a pig goes in at one end and every part of him is used. A dead animal comes into our camp and first there is the hunt for flies or ticks by Dr. Bequaert. Then Thailer makes a slide of its blood, Dr. Allen or I then skin the beast…
Narrator Coolidge was increasing the tempo of his own scientific collecting...
…It was the largest snake I have ever seen outside of captivity and he was in an awkward place to get at without any gun to shoot him. I shouted to a native in the distance and he came to see. He made an exclamation of horror and rushed off yelling, his hands in the air… [pic]When we had him properly skinned, the skull had to be cleaned to go with the specimen and, often times, the whole skeleton may be saved.
Narrator He was asked to provide some internal parasites from an elephant. That is all Coolidge needed to hear. An elephant was finally shot and rolled two hundred feet down a hill…
…I was terrified he would break those magnificent tusks, which came within two pounds of each other in weight. The natives from all around showed up for cutting up the meat and really fought for the entrails. They had tugs of war at the opposite ends of each piece of intestine trying to get the biggest piece for themselves. Standing beneath your elephant tusks is the ideal of any big game hunter.
Narrator With the expedition relatively stationary, Coolidge is free to leave camp in pursuit of rarer game. A precious two-month leave allows Coolidge to head deeper into the famous Kivu Lake District, where renowned taxidermist and naturalist Carl Akeley pitched his last camp. Coolidge is ripe to bag his first Gorilla, the perfect combination of trophy hunting and scientific work.
…My mission was to get a gorilla specimen…As guides I depended on the Batwa Pygmies who are the most familiar with the jungle.
Rebecca Hardin: Batwa Pgymies were Ota Benga’s people, Benga who had been exhibited at the Bronx Zoo…Fifteen of these apes like little creatures squatted behind their spears as I came out of my tent one morning. I ordered them to look for meshingo mkubwa- a large gorilla. Our frightened little men started to fade out of sight. I raised my gun and aimed to the chief, then pointing to my feet like a cawed dog he came and squatted at my side.
Narrator After weeks of tracking different bands with no luck…Eventually we came to the edge of a ridge, there came a low ominous growl. I braced for the charge and seeing a black body moving in the darkest part of the bush not fifteen feet away I fired at it. I pushed on to find if the bullet found its mark.
Narrator His hastily fired bullet didn’t bring the 500 pound, six-foot two gorilla down.
He follows the trail of blood for half an hour before getting another shot.
…I had to take off my hat to this old king who handled his troops so well, covered the rear of the retreat, and took his medicine like a man… at this juncture, the skies opened in sympathy for him, and it has seldom, if ever, rained so hard.
Anthropologist Richard Wrangham: I am sure we see that in killing this gorilla, Coolidge saw him both as a dangerous beast, and as a worthy adversary. He is beginning to become aware in more complex ways of the responsibility of the hunt, and of the need for stewardship with respect to these remarkable animals.
Narrator The Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, which Coolidge would later direct, published his significant dissertation on the genus Gorilla in 1929. In 1928, he properly classified the fourth Great Ape species, Pan paniscus (the Bonobo). Considered a close cousin to the humanoid, it is known for a matriarchal society where sex and affection often supersede violence. Regardless, Coolidge the scientist would take second place organizer and scientific diplomat. Roosevelt’s accomplishments in conservation, as laudable as they were, were confined by and large to the States. Not so with Coolidge, who like the 1920s that spawned him, formed global alliances and tackled the problem of extinction on an international scale.
Act 3 Asia: The Decade of Contradictions.
Narrator KELLEY-ROOSEVELT EXPEDITION
In 1928, Coolidge was asked by Kermit Roosevelt to lead the Indochina portion of the Kelley- Roosevelt expedition for the Field Museum of Natural History of Chicago. It was an extension of the American Museum of Natural History's Central Asiatic Expeditions to Mongolia in the 1920s, seeking to confirm Osborn's theory of Asia as the evolutionary origins of mammalian life, including Homo sapiens.
Historian Laurence Monnais: French interests in Indochina had been largely economic and political, so French scientists hadn’t conducted highly detailed studies, and lagged behind research in the colony often referred to as Teddy Roosevelt’s Philippines. Beyond the explicit scientific and geopolitical rivalry, there was an increasing collaboration and cross-pollination among colonial powers worldwide. In particular, the French ornithologists Jean Delacour and M. Jabouille were more than happy to have bird specimens for the Natural History Museum in Paris from the Kelley-Roosevelt team, and they produced a beautiful book on the birds of Indochina for the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris. The importance of such cultural products for the diplomatic forging of the American empire had their corollaries dating, as for instance with the display of Central African Ota Benga at the Bronx zoo.
…A telegram from Msr. Pierre Jabouille, the most important French official in that district, states that all arrangements have been made for their journey to Hue, in the country's interior. He offers his hospitality to the expedition members and provides porters and transportation.
Monnais: Indochina was a jewel of the French empire, laced with royal reserves for hunting and leisure, and where they can demonstrate their cultural and political finesse. New scientific, diplomatic, and cultural ties are being forged between Europeans and Americans at this time. Only two decades later such ties, created in part out of a common cause of environmental concern, would be mobilized in the face of widespread nationalist and anti-colonial politics to create institutions of environmental governance that transcended national borders.
Anthropologist Leedom Lefferts: Under the French colonial system, both the people and the wildlife are preserved for their own good –from the depredation of the Chinese as well as from competition amongst indigenous people. As Coolidge explored this region, parts of it known today as the Nui Hoang Lien Nature Reserve, he begins to appreciate the complexity of a relatively pristine ecological zone, in an enormous ecosystem that crossed national borders, but is under one system of control and pacification. Everything dripped with moisture, and the green cloud forest was bedecked with moss and epiphytic plants which made every tree a garden in itself.
Narrator From Shanghai, the expedition sails to the portal of Vietnam, the Bay of Along. … we had our first glimpse of Indo-China. There, seeming to rise directly out of the water, one saw literally thousands of island mountains. The sea had carved a great variety of natural bridges, caves, and weird shapes out of the soft limestone of which these great rocks are made.
Monnais The French left vast tracts of land untouched to demonstrate colonial goodwill toward indigenous people while exploiting the rest of their holdings in Indo-China. Isolated from the emerging world economic system since Versailles, Laos and Northern Vietnam are, to use American terminology, a reservation.
Lefferts: The expedition was split into two parties, with Kelley and Roosevelt heading northeast, and Coolidge heading northwest into the interior…After lunch, we mounted our little ponies with our army saddles, coats, guns and saddle bags. The trail climbed steeply through a dense tropical jungle and was made entirely of loose rocks thrown together like giant cobble stones. This was an old Chinese caravan route probably built about the time of Kubla Khan. A blue haze from the smoke of native brush fires, which were very common at this season, softened all the remote outlines… Fires are raging on all the mountains round about so that the sun has often been turned yellow by the haze. It seemed criminal that all the forest should have been burned out in this country except for the valleys.
Hardin: We see here inklings among western observers, and Coolidge of course, that the fabulously rich natural resources bases of colonial landscapes might actually not be infinitely renewable. The rapacious demand for timber, and animal products in a rapidly industrializing global context were taking their toll and as historian Richard Grove has noted, pushing along a discourse on scarcity and environmental concern that had been brewing since the first encounters between Imperial explorers and indigenous savants in the 1700s.
Narrator The expedition heads down the Mekong River.
[pic]…The strenuous land traveling was now over, and we had ahead of us nearly a thousand miles by water, never knowing what thrills a bend in the river might be hiding. We hated to leave the ponies we had grown so fond of and to say goodbye to our military friends, as well as the little known mountain country we had been collecting in.
Laurence Monnais, Historian In the work Coolidge co-authored with Theodore Roosevelt, Jr in 1933, The Three Kingdoms of Indo-China, Coolidge portrays the tribal groups he encounters in Asia in more poetic terms. Decorative elements are described much like bird plumage, and bodies are seen as beautiful.
As promised by the chief we found, lined up on the shore, thirty-three narrow progues each capable of holding about five boxes… The piroguiers, as the French call the river men, stood one in the bow and one in the stern, each using a long pole with a flattened part about half-way up which serves as a paddle…Most of the natives had beautiful physiques and skins of a nut-brown color…
Hammonds These passages in Coolidge’s diaries are eerily reminiscent of those written by Andre Gide in his 1927 work Voyages au Congo, part of a growing wave of black intellectual voices writing against the colonial tropes. But Gide marks a new moment; he goes beyond analyzing colonial interactions to aestheticize the gleaming black bodies of African boatmen along the Congo River.African women, however, were less easily presented as ideals of physical beauty. In Joseph Conrad’s 1906 The Heart of Darkness, a woman standing on the bank of the Congo seems to be almost as terrifying and wild as the forest landscape that surrounds her. Coolidge’s diary entries from Africa depict women either as victims in the stockade, or as powerful, yet repugnant, as with the chief Sua Koko, whose “breasts hang down to her knees.” Diaries from his first travel in Indochina, reflect Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’, an aestheticized objectification of Asian culture, and a feminization of it, a particular conception of it as “closer” to the white race than other groups.
Narrator The Mekong River churns on…The water whirled and boiled at a furious rate. In one or two places we spun completely around until we felt like an eggshell at the mercy of the current. At last one of the boatmen did what had to be done, nosing into the current, he rode it, expertly navigating among rocks that would certainly have sunk a lesser navigator; the water moved so fast that one false move would have been a disaster. But he remained calm, navigating with skill. As long as I live I will not forget the way that fellow worked.
Hardin Throughout Coolidge’s diaries we see extraordinary moments in expedition culture; moments where members are breaking free of conventions and tropes, revealing the interdependence and trust that can be born from forms of human collaboration as is moving through the forces of nature. Along with the ‘orientalism’ and xenophobia, we also see glimmers of astonishment; genuine praise and concern for individuals, both in the Africa diaries and even more so in the Asia diaries. Moments that Victor Turner would call “liminal”, a departure from daily life and social order, where things can sometimes be reversed, if only temporarily.
There may be a native strumming his mandola, and the dogs and pigs will continue to move about like shadows, but the white man with his money, his work, his specimens and his gasoline lamp will have moved on for he doesn't belong to this sort of place.
Coolidge
The natural world seems both abundant and majestic, but also fragile:
Coolidge
Hunting pandas!
(from the Kelley-Roosevelt expedition diaries, and his account in Three Kingdoms):
The farther ones were a red glow, and the nearer ones often so close enough that I could see flames thirty or forty feet high. They resembled great serpents, always alive and changing shape. It seemed criminal that all the forest should have been burned off this country except for the valleys…
PIX: using stills from the Three Kingdoms book/original diaries…photographs and also some of the hand drawn sketches that are quite simple but charming, compelling…see 154…I imagine fading from them into the remarkable footage of actual whitewater navigation, suggesting the inevitably frustrated efforts of explorers to convey in print the drama and discovery of lived experience. Another place where this could be used to great effect to highlight the power of film, and to celebrate the advent of editing technologies of our time, is the sketch on p. 125 relative to footage of women and children we currently have in our assemblage…
Scholar, Historian, Laurence Monnai: Bradley’s work, The Making of Vietnam, points out both the romanticizing of Indochina as a place of happy natives and later the condemnation of French colonial rule were linked to curiosity about concepts of race and civilization in the mid twentieth century. As a travel destination, to many Americans it seemed so distant. Scientifically, Indochina seemed to be an important place because of its imagined characteristic as a mixing ground of species from India and China. Scientists were interested in specific questions about hybridity and speciation they hoped could be answered from this cross-roads of animal and floral species. The area of northwest Vietnam was densely forested and was very rugged terrain. Because of this, the Kelley Roosevelt expedition had expected to, and did, find a high diversity of species.
Furthermore, because French interested in Indochina had been largely economic and political, French scientists had not had much opportunity to conduct detailed examinations of the region. By the 1930s, their efforts still lagged behind American research in the Philippines, for example, and much of Indochina remained little studied. So there was both explicit scientific and geopolitical rivalry, but also increasing collaboration and cross-pollination among colonial powers worldwide. As the century wore on, American goals intersected increasingly with those of the French, and American effort and money on expeditions to the area served French interests well. In particular, the French ornithologists Jean Delacour and M. Jabouille were more than happy to have bird specimens for the Natural History Museum in Paris from the Kelley-Roosevelt team, and they produced a beautiful book on the birds of Indochina for the 1931 Colonial Exposition in Paris. The importance of such cultural products for empire cannot be overstated, and had their corollaries in American society dating, as for instance with the display of Central African Ota Benga in the U.S. at fairs and zoological parks.
After returning from Indo-China, imbued with images of the French colonial approach to preserved ecosystems as patrimony for scientific and leisure use by elites, Coolidge begins to agitate for wildlife protection and for government controls over exactly the type of big-game hunting in which he had engaged. He actively lobbies to establish an international parks system and game laws to safeguard large mammals and protect botanical areas through his role as Secretary of the American Committee of International Wildlife Protection in 1930. And yet, on all his expeditions he had been party to some of the most extensive killing and collecting of mammals accomplished in expedition history, barring perhaps Teddy Roosevelt.
ASIATIC PRIMATE EXPEDITION
Borneo, Sumatra and Thailand, 1937
Narrator: Coolidge was to return to Indochina in 1937, but in a different kind of expedition, in subtly different times, and mainly to Thailand and Borneo. Of course, science had played incredibly contradictory roles in society since the era of colonial expansion. On the one hand, it enabled the steady and swift creep of industrialization and global integration; on the other it begins to chronicle the cost of that creep for rural settings and those natural and cultural systems whose very diversity attests to some isolation from other parts of the planet.
Mitman: By the 1930s American popular culture, too, had begun to reflect ambivalence about modern technology, and its power. This affected representations of nature, and of tropical settings, making them an important foil for modern life. It also made popular heroes of those characters—hunters, explorers, wild animal trainers, who were seen as the adventurous voyagers not only between geographical locations, but also in some ways between civilizations, and eras. (Pix: Kong clips from the Africa based portion of the original film, of Kong the beast in the forest, and capture attempts by hunters)
When Merian Cooper began production on the 1933 film version of King Kong, starring Fay Wray, he was interested in capturing a live ape from the wild for the film project. He called Coolidge, whose role in administering special hunting and collecting permits for American citizens abroad, and as a leading scientific expert on gorillas, made him an important advisor to Cooper, and also a kind of model for the characters in the film. Cooper himself modeled many of the characters in King Kong after sportsman-naturalists whom he knew.
Narrator: The film not only captured the fascination of audiences in North America with the fauna of tropical worlds, but also epitomized many of the multiple and sometimes contradictory notions about nature that had begun to circulate in the “developed world,” including anti-modernist anxieties and modernist triumphalism, romantic ideals of man in nature, and evolutionary racist attitudes.
In 1928 H. Beston writes The Outermost House,, capturing both the transcendentalist legacy of man moving as a humble witness through nature, and beginning to sketch a new discourse which, with its rejection of linear evolutionary thought and its emphasis on separate nations, presages some of the social shifts that are coming to U.S. cities, and to far flung colonial capitols as well: [1]
We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals…We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therin we err and err greatly. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a workld older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. (PIX: Archival photographs, stills from monkey houses at Franklin Park and Bronx Zoo facilities, to evoke the pathos of captivity and display at that time…)
Hammond: The primitive ape protagonist in the film King Kong is both anthropomorphized and also portrayed as larger and more bestial than any real ape. Fay Wray’s role as the heroine includes elements of fear but also of empathy and advocacy for the beast, as women, in this era, were widely thought to be closer to nature than men, who instead were its tamers and dominators, working toward progress, technology, and civilization. Kong is ultimately destroyed atop the Empire State Building, encircled by airplanes, both symbols Cooper chose because they were icons of modern civilization.
Pix: further clips from the original Kong film, the beast clinging to the top of the Empire State building, encircled by planes, and then falling to his death.
Borstelman: Of course, these tropes of modern and primitive were not only applied to animals, or to human residents of the tropics. Within fast growing and changing American cities at that time they were applied across various social groups—sometimes with remarkable irony. Think, for instance, of Vivien Leigh’s famous monologue in Tennessee Williams’ play turned film Streetcar Named Desire, where she implores her sister’s sexy and brutish working class polish husband Stanley (Marlon Brando) in her desperate yet flowery school teacher’s English not to act upon nor acknowledge the sexual tension between them, but rather to lift himself up from the miasmic, brutish mud of bare human behavior toward progress and self control.
Narrator: King Kong was a stunning climax to the taxonomic, evolutionary vision that shaped much of the century’s colonial collecting expeditions, and marked in some ways the end of colonial ideas of the modern as “here” and the primitive as “over there.” In many ways it heralded and coincided with the end of formally colonial practices, and announced the beginning of a more modern era of empire. But there was time for Coolidge to undertakes one last major hunting expedition to Asia in 1937.
The Asiatic Primate Expedition reflects a tension in both the history of the expedition and in Coolidge’s own ideas about conservation. He knew from his categorization of gorillas following the Harvard Expedition that a large pool of specimens would be required to conduct his intended authoritative study of gibbons. Yet time was running out.
Haraway: Harold Coolidge was instrumental in national and international wildlife conservation. Legally enforced conservation, however, created some problems for anatomists and physiologists because it made collecting specimens more difficult. This is why Coolidge selected Asia for the primate expedition. The London Convention on Africa, effective January 1936, strictly prohibited the gorilla and partly protected that chimpanzee. Specimens could have been obtained if a scientific permit was granted in advance, but since the law was very new Coolidge thought he would never be granted such a liberal permit to collect enough specimen of one species for research n variation. Coolidge urged Yerkes's confidentiality on these reasons for the expedition.
…The British are planning a Pan-Asiatic Convention similar to the African Convention… When this happens, it will be too late to obtain a sufficient series of one species to make much needed studies of variation. But now would be the last opportunity to make extensive collections.
Wrangham: So here we see the internal tension. Coolidge wanted to conserve; but he wanted the specimens. He was a man of two eras… The specimens he collected, many still on exhibit at the Harvard Museum today, remain as a testimony to the awkward trade-off between scientific vision and moral responsibility, between the continuing elements of both exploitation and concerned engagement
Suri: As World War II approached, political and social "realities" begin to change. A new context for ecological thinking emerged, as colonial powers struggled to redefine their relationships with the remote areas of Africa and Asia.
Narrator: Not surprisingly, given these cultural and political currents, in the Asiatic Primate Expedition new methods emerged in the study of primates that not began to limit their wholesale destruction for research and collecting, but also began to change the ways in which biologists and physical anthropologists understood the category of race.
Haraway: Coolidge, by then of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, sponsored the Asiatic Primate Expedition of 1937. It was to be Coolidge’s final expedition, and unlike his previous trip with the Roosevelts, it was to be a key turning point in scientific exploration. (PIX: from APE footage, of the four expedition members, together with their pets and equipment) Coolidge spanned the classic and modern eras in both science and global politics. The changes within the scientific methodology and the conflicting emphases of the traditional and emerging approaches is dramatized in the interaction of three of the participants in Roosevelt’s Asiatic Primate Expedition, namely Drs. Carpenter, Schultz. And Washburn.
PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition Diary entry with matching footage
…Our party had already made a one day scouting trip to Do Sutra and Chiang Dao. They came back with discouraging reports of the number of gibbons. Adolph, Ray and Gus made another scouting trip on the trail to Chiang Mai while Sherry and I stayed in town to buy provisions for the big push to our first camp. Sherry and I spent a hectic two days getting all the supplies bought and sorted. Money had to be gotten in copper pennies for we were told the natives would accept nothing else. We had sixty standard oil tine made with hinged covers and places to padlock them. It was no easy job getting one month to 2 months worth of supplies for our size gang and getting baskets and standard oil tins made to carry it in. Natives only carry 25 pounds on each of two poles in this country and our stuff loaded for pony transport The sole means of cross-country travel is along steep, narrow trails which led over mountain ranges and rivers. The trails were impassable between June and October on account of having been washed out by the rains. All reports indicated that the tribes we proposed to visit often suffered from famine, so we could not rely on living off the land.
PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition with matching footage
…We did spend a day with Daiglaud, a young ornithologist up in the foot hills of Chiang Dao. We fund two troops of Gibbons quite plainly and found a fine observation post for Carpenter's work. The forest was semi deciduous with very steep rising rocky peaks and deep valleys.
Conservation Biologist Dr. Xuan Le Canh (Vietnamese): Colonial expeditions relied heavily on different kinds of local knowledge, some from other specialists, and much from the local community. This is still true…when I lead expeditions today to evaluate primate populations I must first contact local people, find out what they know and obtain their cooperation to work in their areas.
PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition footage with matching diary voice:
…There may be a native strumming his mandola, and the dogs and pigs will continue to move about like shadows, but the white man with his money, his work, his specimens and his gasoline lamp will have moved on for he doesn't belong to this sort of place. …
Haraway: Clarence Ray Carpenter, a native of North Carolina, is eager to study the gibbon, which is particularly interesting because it has upright posture and a monogamous sexual life. Carpenter’s interest and training in film made him an avid and accurate student of both animal and human behavior. His aim during A.P.E. is to observe live gibbons in order to discern the meaning of their movements, calls and family behavior. Two months into his study, he recorded in his field notes that he had not actually seen a gibbon, even though he constantly could hear them.
At Doi Chien Dao we observed gibbons in their natural undisturbed surroundings. Here we filmed their life in the wild, and made the first successful recordings of wild gibbon calls.
PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition footage of gibbon vocalizing, with matching diary voice:
…Beginning with a guttural croak, the cry rose sharply to a high, stuttering scream, a weird falsetto yodel; although from afar, it is a clear whistle that dies away among the echoes.
PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition with matching diary entry:
…Our base camp is made up of several substantial shacks thatched with banana leaves. We are on Mount Angka. Below us we had a fine view down a long valley. Nearby were considerable clearings, occupied by farms of mountain Karens. Here were wild banana plantations, wooded ridges, and almost every type of forest to be found on the mountain was within an hours climb.
Haraway: In these studies, carried out in Thailand (known then as Siam) from February to June, 1937, Carpenter combines careful research on primate behavior with a strong interest in communication processes and film. Carpenter becomes responsible for the production of pimate films and videotapes, the establishment of Penn State University as a depository ofr the psyschological Cinema Register and for developing an internationally known collection of psychological, psychiatric and animal behavior films. At the same time he forged new pedagogical paths that linked the study of animal and human behavior.[2]
PIX: APE footage of Carpenter at work, with matching Diary entry …Dr. Carpenter is the best-qualified person to make studies of the gibbon. In his Siam camp are ten living gibbons of varying ages, which make ideal subjects for close observations. How do they use their lips when they called? How do they react to snakes or other animals? These and a hundred other questions can be answered by watching our friendly pets.
PIX: Gibbon play from APE footage, Coolidge Diary voice
… Information on man's place in nature can result only from intensive studies of primates in the field.
Haraway: During this expedition Carpenter studies sex as a way to understand governance, the physiological structure of control. In this study Carpenter asserts that there is enough evidence in his research to conclude that humans and non-human primates share similarities in basic human needs, drives and types of behavior. An example he gave is that many aspects of sexual behavior are similar between man and apes, which seem to indicate that these behaviors are rooted in biology and not culture. Carpenter thus contributed to bionomics of organic social groups, which is the study of organisms in their environment.
PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition with matching footage
If the gibbon could throw as well as it can catch, the forest would be a very dangerous place. They can jump across an opening forty feet wide between trees and catch a pigeon in mid-air.
Hunting and collecting thus gave way to observation and behavioral studies, and to a new interest in the notion of man as a kindred creature to apes.
PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition footage of humans holding hands with monkeys, apes; with matching diary voice: …Information on man's place in nature can result only from intensive studies of primates in the field. PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition with matching footage. One of the most vital questions in this field study is, to what extent are the so-called human characteristics a result of our own culture, and which of them are a product of our in escapable evolutionary primate heritage?
Narrator: Carpenter's social maps of the relations of the gibbon revealed social control, which is based on dominance. Dominance is usually, but not always, expressed by adult males, where status was measurable by degrees of dominance.
Haraway: In an effort to predict future group states, Carpenter drew what he called social maps that were guided by several questions, which were: How do groups form? How are they maintained? How might groups be scientifically managed? He found that fighting and competitive aggression were a mechanism for group integration because it established dominance gradients. Certain amounts of this behavior were called leadership, control and initiative, while other insufficient amounts led to disrupted groups. Carpenter believed that these observations proved to be appropriate as a pilot study of human social networks, where control was more complex.
Hardin: It is difficult to know how these findings about social hierarchy were understood by expedition members as relevant to their own behaviors, toward one another, toward the inhabitants of the region, and toward the animals themselves.
PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition of expedition members, with matching diary entries:
…Paper money was exchanged for copper pennies. We were told that the Natives would accept nothing else. It took a whole coolie to carry the money bags….We scattered small change among the people as we paid the coolies for helping us, knowing well that it would all go into buying opium.
Narrator: But while one end of the expedition was carrying out pioneering behaviorist work, the other was still collecting specimens in quantity. Coolidge’s diaries refer repeatedly to the difficulty with which these two field activities could be carried out in such close proximity to one another. Carpenter moved his camp, and found greater success at observing the gibbon. .
PIX: base camp and landscape footage, with matching diary entries…The Asiatic Primate Expedition was unusually fortunate in its choice of two beautiful mountains not far from Chiang Mai, Northern Siam. There, mountain valleys were teeming with families of wild gibbons, so that the collecting we did made no noticeable impression on their numbers.
Narrator: head zoologist Adolf Schultz dissected animals as fast as they rolled in, Schultz recorded every detail from belly parasite to skeletal morphology.
PIX: footage of Schultz with a live gibbon in his arms, dissecting dead gibbons;
Diary entries: …At the collecting camp, measurements were made an anatomical materials were preserved. We learned many things from dissecting the gibbon. …From one point of view, the longer and more numerous a series of specimens, the more valuable it is for taxonomic purposes. On the other hand, I do not think that it would be necessary to procure one hundred specimens in order to determine that classification of a race of primates.
Asiatic Primate Expedition diary entry, with matching footage
…When collecting came to a close, we had well over nine hundred small mammals, representing more than seventy species, whereas before the total of all mammal collections from any part of northern Indo-China came to less than eight hundred.
…At the end of the expedition, we knew more about the gibbon than any other anthropoid ape that had previously been studied. On one expedition, we changed the whole picture. It went from being the least known, to the best known.
Narrator: Renowned anthropologist Sherwood Washburn also cut his academic teeth during the Asiatic Primate Expedition. He assisted Dr. Schultz, but was also key in the shift to new, less invasive methods.
Haraway: Washburn ultimately pioneers methods that combine behavioral study with comparative functional anatomy in understanding human evolutionary origins. His contributions to a new physical anthropology and to the 1950s UNESCO statement on race provide a scientific foundation to the concept of the universal family of man that significantly undermined the evolutionary racism of the earlier twentieth century.
PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition with matching footage
…Regarding Gibbons the sight of these beautiful wild animals, or even the inspiring sound of their bird like songs saluting the rising sun in a tropical forest symphony, lifts the hearts of all those who see or hear them, and pleases many of us that we share a common heritage. To me the best definition of conservation is a rational management of the earth's resources to achieve the highest sustained quality of living for mankind… But Mankind will exist in a much impoverished world if gibbons do not survive.
PIX Asiatic Primate Expedition with matching footage
Suddenly, we drifted around a curve and there burst upon us a row of electric street lights! They spelled modern civilization as we had not known since Hanoi. It seemed at that very moment as if a curtain had closed behind us to obscure all that had happened in the past months, and the only traces left to link us with the trip were memories and notebooks and boxes of small stuffed animals and brightly colored birds.
Act Five Conservation, race and scientific diplomacy in the post-colonial world
Narrator Noted primatologists George Schaller and Christophe Boesch and Richard Wrangham join Swedish wildlife photographer and anti-bush meat poaching activist Karl Amman. They are on an expedition in the Bili/Bondo region of the Congo to investigate a possible new discovery in the region, a giant chimp. Traversing some of the same areas Coolidge visited over seventy years prior, the scientists employ indigenous peoples as field technicians rather than merely as trackers or porters, and collect fecal matter rather than carcasses. Schaller, Boesch and their technicians search for hair samples and footprints, inspect abandoned nests, and record primate vocalizations. It is not Coolidge's elephant hunt, but the echoes remind us of both changes and continuity in expedition culture.
Narrator Upon his return from the A.P.E. expedition, Coolidge raised the funds to pay the debts the expedition incurred. That other members of the expedition spent the time instead publishing scientific results he never begrudged. He could not know the extent to which scientific insights from that expedition would lead to entirely new formulations of the idea of race, humanity, and the natural world, forever altering the stage on which his own efforts for international conservation would unfold. Perhaps Coolidge’s sense of reward lay elsewhere than in data analysis and publication.
He was back in New England, long an intellectual center for environmentalist thought1 Emerson and Thoreau, 19th century works that had given rise to the Transcendentalist movement, nourished an ethical tradition that valued nature for its own sake. His early writings on conservation reference such values, moving away from Teddy Roosevelt and Madison Grant:
… By the side of religion, by the side of science, by the side of poetry and art, stands natural beauty, not as a rival to these, but as the common inspirer and nourisher of them all, and with a secret of her own besides…It alone makes a common appeal to the sectaries of all our different schools of poetry and art, ancient and modern, and to many more besides these.
Peal I remember when I was ending my soccer career and becoming a forester, that I was impressed by the feeling of being out in the forest; the silence and majesty of it. I thought to myself: how can people destroy such a place? It was there, in the forest, that I came to the realization that I should be work to conserve such places.
Christophe Boesch, Primatologist People around here cannot believe that we are here simply to gather knowledge, to better understand this complex system. They all think that we must be mining, or somehow making ourselves wealthy. How do you explain the love of nature for its own sake?
Narrator Working off and on with curators at Harvard on relevant collections, Coolidge developed his crosscutting understanding of ecology, zoology, and primatology. Coolidge’s love of science was profound; he joined the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council as the Executive Director of the Pacific Science Board in 1947. He coordinated scientific research in the Pacific until his retirement in 1970, assisting over 2,000 scientists and a variety of governments during his tenure. Later conservation biologists would call him a “career maker.”
Peal I was impressed as a young man by his generous support for those of us who were up-and-coming conservationists. He was a great man, for those of us still struggling.
Narrator Yet Coolidge remained, himself, on the sidelines of science. More and more often he was to be found striving to advance political and diplomatic solutions to the management of global environmental resources.
Jerimi Suri Coolidge’s travels connect him intimately with European diplomatic and scientific elite, and pave the way for him to become an institution builder on these issues. Coolidge carried out his early career in the wake of the treaty of Versailles. In October 1948 he travels to a former forest and hunting retreat for French nobility: la Foret de Fontainebleu outside of Paris. The French call a conference in association with Unesco, following on previous ones in Switzerland and Mexico, to establish the International Union for the Protection of Nature, or IUCN.
Narrator: The importance of cultural values is centrally featured in the construction of a new generation of institutions. In a contradictory but compelling logic, they appeal to the democratization of nature through its protection.
In 1949, Coolidge, still bound tightly to his past, paid homage to the work of Theodore Roosevelt whose principal purpose underlying the establishment of many of our 130 national parks and monuments, whether they be Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Yosemite, or Natural Bridge, is the inspirational value of their unspoiled natural features.
Suri U.S. actors and agencies were to play a key role in transcending the institutions and imperatives of imperialism. Coolidge worked harder than most toward transnational initiatives to carry nature conservation into postcolonial times. He made his mark in global conservation, in an arena where Roosevelt might have flourished had he not died young. Coolidge spent the rest of his days supporting the establishment of countless wildlife reserves throughout Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, and Latin America.
Let us hope that a New World awakening of interest in the Western Hemisphere Convention on Nature Protection will greatly encourage the establishment of new national parks throughout the American Republics…”
Mitman The Federal government’s fledgling Fish and Wildlife service (long involved in fishery, sealing, and whaling debates at international levels) responded to these “S.O.S. calls” on species extinction, as did the American Committee for International Wildlife Protection (ACIC).
While the U.S., as part of its imperial mandate, becomes an energetic new presence on the international stage of resource management, Coolidge retains a deep connection with the increasingly powerful American scientific and leisure elite, the same patrician class that was displacing and reshaping rural areas at home. The Boone and Crockett Club that Roosevelt and Madison Grant and Coolidge had all been so active in, with its’ requisite manors and manners, provided the generous financial aid that enabled ACIC’s formation. It is thus no wonder that, in 1949 Coolidge wrote, in the Journal of Renewable Natural Resources, that conservation could only be handled by “international cooperation, in a large measure guided by the Anglo-Saxon races.”
…It is now time that global awareness of the need for the protection of natural areas should be a matter of the highest priority so that tomorrow's generations will not be forever deprived of a substantial part of their environmental heritage and their ecological birth right.. Preserving the environment, can best be accomplished through educating and controlling those responsible for its destruction as well as by limiting the rapid increase of human populations, and furthering their redistribution in certain critical areas.
Hammonds But the stark horrors of Nazi violence perpetrated on racial bases, creates a climate of unprecedented urgency. In 1948 Unesco adopts a resolution at its 6th session, to consider “a program of dissemination of scientific facts designed to bring about the disappearance of that which is commonly called race prejudice.” On July 18, 1950 they issued a formal statement on race asserting the agreement of international scientists that mankind is one: all men belong to the same species. Genetic variability, it seemed, was a process that created groups of varying degrees of stability and differentiation, but which do not correspond to the fixed notion of “race.”
Haraway The new ideas about “family of man” both came out of and fed into scientific research. “Man the Hunter” was viewed as the "total adaptation" that demanded that "all humans change," from caring for the sick, to making man the enemy of all other animals in the wild, to basing art on artifacts of war, to the love of killing, all most efficient through human cooperation.
Washburn emphasized his own emerging point of view : evolution (is) primarily a method of understanding human behavior (rather than the study of evolution being to determine man's place in nature).” Through behavior field study Washburn's hunting hypothesis contributed to a concept of functional anatomy: human locomotion, tool use, and speech all are rooted in a survival adaptation to a specific environment—that of “Man the Hunter”. Thus, psychology and primate field studies joined the "new physical anthropology" in studying human populations who were seen as discrete, and bounded.
Haraway The new scientific concept of race, and the role of science in rebuilding Europe in the wake of WWII, tended to foster forms of paternalism in interactions between scientists and indigenous populations on the ground. Negative aspects of colonial legacies were not easily swept away; rather, new forms emerged. During this period, organizations like IUCN and the World Wildlife adopted conservation strategies that emphasized protecting resources for scientific study by the American/European elite rather than preserving them for use by native inhabitants.
Narrator In the early 1960s, the members of the watershed A.P.E. expedition were making progress along their respective paths. Clarence Ray Carpenter, having built a successful career breeding and studying captive chimpanzees, is active in framing the National Defense Act concerning employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin. Coolidge, for his part, is busy brokering international agreements and institutions for the conservation of wilderness. His thoughts on his early days of expedition adventures may well have shifted along with, or in light of, popular and scientific opinions about hunting, race, and human relations. In 1961, he co-founds the World Wildlife Fund, at the behest of Prince Philip of Denmark (and, as his wife Martha stated, "for his sins, as a repentant butcher"). It becomes the principal source of privately managed funds for international conservation. Coolidge organizes and served as Secretary General of the First World Conference on National Parks in 1962, as founding director of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation and on the Advisory Board of Cultural Survival, an organization that seeks to protect the rights and cultures of indigenous peoples.
Suri The1961 profusion of new institutions based in Europe and the U.S. for managing natural resources worldwide is astonishing. It’s related to the fact of African colonial governments toppling like dominos across that continent in 1960, and to the attendant sense of concern that new modes and sources of control be put in place. To be sure, Coolidge was not only atoning for past sins, nor merely advancing an aesthetic vision of human rights to natural inspiration. He was also acting strategically, and in his own nation’s interest, in a rapidly changing world. Gaining in maturity, and with ever-wider social networks, Coolidge became an increasingly important mentor to Kermit Roosevelt and to Russell Train, who together filed incorporation papers for the American Wildlife Federation in 1961. One of their key experts and allies in that effort was Arthur Nicky Arundel, who had served the U.S. CIA under Dulles, and who, while a marine colonel, had been involved in counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam.
Conservation Biologist, Le Xuan Canh (Vietnamese): Yes, of course there are complicated issues with colonialism, and with post- colonialism, and the role of these early conservationists. But in the midst of very difficult times, on difficult terrain, they did good, careful science. Now we can build upon their findings, and work to preserve and protect the ecosystems that are most in danger.
Mitman Political independence coincides with modern abilities to ‘mange’ nature. This creates a radically divided interface with western powers for new African elites during the 1960s. There’s the voice of the green revolution, coming from the land grant universities at home in the U.S., and bolstering—even industrializing—rural agricultural production. Then comes the conservationist’s marketing campaigns for peoples throughout the tropics to wisely develop their “wild gold”—pristine and diverse landscapes unlike anything left in Europe or the U.S, as eco-touristic destinations.
The Tanzanian government formally acknowledges the value and importance of natural resources and wildlife in the Arusha Declaration, in 1964. Schools for the training of new African conservationists gain international support, and recruit students at a pan-African scale.
Pea l: When my career as a soccer goalie ended, I studied at the Wildlife College at Mweka, Tanzania, before returning to Liberia for my career in Forestry. It is there that I learned about walking transects, and basic ecological monitoring, as well as anti-poaching. You need this knowledge! It is difficult to manage protected areas, and still so difficult to mount expeditions for survery work and monitoring. On one of most recent expeditions, the porters ran away and kept the food supply, leaving us everything to carry!
Narrator: The expedition remains a popular form of information collection, and is increasingly popular as an apolitical genre of film and television as well. But this is not all that remains to link Coolidge’s efforts to today’s challenges
Samuel-Alain Nguiffo, Environmental Attorney Centre Pour l'Environnement et le Developpement (CED) Cameroon. Large-scale habitat preservation has made a contribution the conservation movement. I appreciate and the work done by men and women like Harold Coolidge. But today there are multi-billion dollar corporations and multilateral aid and development agencies making direct transactions with mining and timber conglomerates. One pen stroke eliminates a park or floods an area containing fifteen successful community-based conservation programs. It's difficult to know whether individual projects -- as important as they are in the aggregate -- can really change the forces of corruption, over-consumption, and heavily linked transnational companies.
Hardin: Since the days of the Coolidges and the Roosevelts -- the trophy hunters, or what Donna Haraway calls “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” -- the conservation movement has come a long way. Our knowledge of our environment has grown tremendously, and the conversations at these international tables has broadened and deepened to include many more different types of actors. But social hierarchies, so often played out through the categories of race and class and the expansion of commerce, still structure interactions in profound and difficult ways. And if anything the role of governments has had to decrease to make room for sub national and transnational actors, and their partnerships.
If an oil company provides helicopters along with annual reports inclusive of the latest rhetoric from the environmental movement, they may start to look very attractive to expeditionary scientists who owe results to their discipline and to their sponsors. It's about culture, it's about understanding history, and it's about who controls the play on the world stage.
Narrator: Awarding Coolidge the prestigious J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize in 1980, President Jimmy Carter wrote: "As the first American recipient of this prize, you exemplify the American tradition of seeing a need and organizing the means to respond to it. You gave very early warning of the plight of endangered species when few could even comprehend this concept… your life has meant a better life and future for all of us."
(pix: Coolidge as a boy on squam lake, as an adult on squam lake with pet monkeys, playing in boats; as a hunter, as a conference delegate in necktie and nametag).
Narrator: That course has been as much about culture as about science; as much about human interactions with other humans as with the natural world. It is still unfolding, and still in hotly contested ways. A scientific diplomat and former Eugenicist, how would Coolidge have responded to the Arusha declaration of 2003, where indigenous peoples from many African settings came together to declare their sense of displacement from proliferating protected areas in Africa? The answers to today’s conundrums can only be found by carefully examining the contradictions—and contributions—of those like Coolidge who stood fast during times of momentous transformation, creating new structures that we, now, are transforming.
But Coolidge also conveyed to us something else: his enthusiasm for expeditionary science, with its elements of unpredictable intimacy, and immediacy. The expedition remains an unrivaled form of self-discovery. It also remains linked to discovery of the world around us, and assertion of control over it.
Wrangham (on camera, as those around him pack up the 2001 field camp): Yes, well, we didn’t find the new species of Chimp this time, but that just makes it all the more fun to come back another time, doesn’t it? After all, it is partly about the pleasure of the hunt, the mystery, the excitement of the expedition? Right? Cheers…
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[1] Cited in the preface to Jennifer Wolch and Jody Emel’s 1998 work Animal Geographies: place, politics, and identity in the nature-culture borderlands. London: Verso.
[2] Biographical note to the Clarence Ray Carpenter collection at the University Archives/Penn State Room
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