THE MIGRATORY BIRD TREATY AND THORNTON W. BURGESS

The 1916 Migratory Bird Treaty has been a powerful piece of American conservation legislation for 100 years, but few know about the important role a children’s author played in its passage. 

 

Journalist and Good Housekeeping editor Thornton W. Burgess never expected to be a children’s author.  But after his first book, Old Mother West Wind, was published by Little Brown in 1910, other titles followed and soon attracted a voracious audience. Combining a strong writing background with his deep love of nature, Burgess poured out children’s books and daily newspaper stories that catapulted him, Jimmy Skunk, Reddy Fox, Grandfather Frog and dozens of other characters into the hearts and homes of readers throughout the country. In less than 10 years Thornton Burgess was credited with reaching “millions of children” with his predominate theme of respect and stewardship for nature.

At that time, one of the most influential men in American conservation was Dr. William Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park, now the Bronx Zoo. Hornaday was a fiery, often abrasive wildlife activist, author, and lobbyist widely credited with saving the American buffalo.

Burgess lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, but often traveled to New York on business. One day he decided to visit Hornaday at the zoo in hopes of getting an endorsement for his bird sanctuaries program (see future post). He was swiftly dismissed by the busy administrator. When another opportunity arose, however, Burgess wrote to Hornaday, describing his massive following of readers and nature club members. (A newly-formed Burgess “Bedtime Stories” club sponsored by the Kansas City Star attracted 50,000 members in three weeks.)

Hornaday was impressed. He sent Burgess a warm, complimentary letter with a copy of one of his recent articles and an invitation to meet for lunch at the Zoological Park. The writer’s gift in touching children and parents with his nature stories translated into a resource that Hornaday prized: “Truly you have in your hands tremendous power,” he told Burgess.

That year, 1916, Hornaday and others were working hard to achieve passage of the Migratory Bird Treaty. When Thornton Burgess asked how he could help with the effort, the conservationist had a ready answer:

“I think you can score a good point by describing ‘the Gauntlet of the Guns’ that a wild duck runs when spring shooting is in vogue, all the way from the Gulf to Canada. In the days of spring shooting, I often wonder how a duck could get through alive, and how any duck could find feed and get a little rest on the journey without being killed. The picture of Mrs. Duck running the ‘Gauntlet of the Guns’ rather appeals to my imagination.” (Letter, WH to TB, Feb. 23, 1916)

This suggestion became Burgess’ blueprint. Between March and May 1916 he wrote daily newspaper columns that depicted with pathetic, heart-wrenching detail the plight of migrating birds. Hornaday wrote to Burgess, saying, “I noted with great pleasure your treatment of Mrs. Quack and her troubles; and I rejoice when I reflect upon the amount of good work your stories are accomplishing for the maintenance of the migratory bird law and the treaty” (Nature’s Ambassador, p. 152). The columns were published the next year as a collection titled The Adventures of Poor Mrs. Quack.

The Migratory Bird Treaty passed on August 16, 1916. A few months later, Hornaday wrote Burgess with jubilant thanks and described the effort to pass the treaty.

“…the result [of your work] was overwhelmingly manifested two months ago when we had a show-down in the United States Senate with the enemies of the migratory law. They put up a great fight. They spent a lot of money and a lot of effort in lobbying in Washington and in their public campaigns, but we smote them hip and thigh and gave them the worst licking any bunch of enemies of wildlife ever received. They were beaten in the Senate with their efforts to destroy the migratory bird law appropriations by a vote of 52 to 8…”

“But the crowning triumph was the Senate’s treatment of the international treaty with Canada for the protection of all the migratory birds north of Mexico, clear to the Arctic Ocean. The attitude of the Senate was of course clearly foreshadowed in the vote to sustain the migratory bird law; but even with all that that we were not prepared for the lightning stroke of progress which sent the treaty triumphantly through the Senate in four days! (NA, p. 152)

How important is the 100-year-old Migratory Bird Treaty? “Its success in saving birds and providing a basis for future action is still impressive,” wrote environmental historian Kurkpatrick Dorsey in The Dawn of Conservation Diplomacy. “It is still in force and environmentalists and governmental agencies still use the enabling legislation as the basis for action… Internationally, conservationists used the MBT as the starting point for the 1936 Migratory Bird Treaty with Mexico, the 1940 agreement with Latin American states, a 1971 world convention on wetlands protection, and other treaties with Japan and the USSR (DCD, p. 241).

An interesting facet of the Migratory Bird Treaty, Dorsey says, is that it was “a child of sentiment,” not the product of international dissention: it arose from a desire to save birds. When William Hornaday profusely thanked Thornton Burgess’ for his “valuable service to the migratory birds in the production of this [Mrs. Quack] series for your great multitude of readers,” there is no question that he was acknowledging the role a master story teller played in influencing public opinion to secure passage of a cornerstone of American conservation legislation.




                                                    *  *  *  * 


Author Christie Lowrance is giving a talk on naturalist, children's author, and radio pioneer Thornton Burgess at the Arnold Arboretum in Boston on May 18, 2016 at 7 p.m. (see link). Her biography Nature's Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess will be available.


https://my.arboretum.harvard.edu/Info.aspx?DayPlanner=1503&DayPlannerDate=5/18/2016

 TO OBTAIN A CALENDAR OF EVENTS AND LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MIGRATORY BIRD TREATY, EMAIL MBTREATY100@FWS.GOV

MEMORIAL DAY

Memorial Day is an occasion to remember those who gave their lives in military service. Maybe it can also be a time to reflect on lives that were spared. The following post relates the circumstances and research for my biography Nature’s Ambassador: The Legacy of Thornton W. Burgess that linked together a 19^th century Civil War naval officer, a 20^th century American children’s author, and a  21^st century biographer.  

When children’s author and naturalist Thornton Burgess was born in 1874, the scars in his Cape Cod birthplace had barely begun to heal from Civil War tragedies. If hundreds of thousands of lives were lost by the war’s end in April, 1865, millions more were devastated as families and communities struggled to adjust to missing, dead and maimed sons, husbands, fathers, friends, local leaders, tradesmen, and workers. There were fifty-six deaths in Burgess’ small hometown of Sandwich, Massachusetts alone.

One Civil War veteran who returned home to Sandwich, perhaps miraculously, was Captain Charles I. Gibbs. As a naval officer he had survived fierce battles at Fort Jackson, New Orleans, Port Hudson, Vicksburg, Mobile Bay, and at the Union blockage of the Mississippi. He described the details of one engagement to a family member:

This morning we have passed Vicksburg, through one of the heaviest fires from rifled and shell guns that you can imagine… A man was knocked down and had his head split open so near me that we were touching each other. My old friend and messmate master’s mate Howard Moffatt, lost his left arm. I have also to report the death of Thomas Flaherty, formerly an operative in the Boston and Sandwich Glass Works. He had both legs and part of one hand shot off, and died in about an hour. He was knocked down by a shell while bravely fighting at his gun, and died a hero; without a murmur. I am safe and ready for another fight. 

 

 (Yarmouth Register, July 18, 1862, courtesy of Sandwich Archives)

 

The same year Gibbs was fighting at Vicksburg, his father-in-law, Henry Hunt, Esq. sold or gave a large, two-story house on School Street to his daughter, Louisa Antoinette Hunt, who was Gibb’s wife. In the early 1870s the Gibbses rented at least part of the house to a young couple, Caroline and Thornton Burgess. Both Charles and Thornton undoubtedly knew each other and it is not unlikely that they were distantly related.

During a January snowstorm in 1874, Caroline, pregnant with her first child, gave birth at home to Thornton W. Burgess, Jr. Three weeks later, her landlady Louisa, who was pregnant with her last child, one of six, gave birth to Rufus Marmaduke in Hyannis. Within a year, both Caroline’s husband and Louisa’s baby would be dead.

Lives change and people must revise dreams and expectations. A new widow, Caroline Burgess and her baby moved in with her uncle who lived nearby in the village. The Gibbses sold 6 School Street in 1875, however, they left behind something wonderful that was accidentally discovered 106 years later.

In 1981 my husband David and I bought the old house at 6 School Street which badly needed repair and refurbishing. One day we stopped to check on the progress of electrician Dave Gove who was working on wiring in the attic. He had gone home for the day, but left for us something on the hallway stairs. A note said he had found it under wooden floorboards in the attic.

It was a packet of letters, no envelopes, tied together with a slim, blue silk ribbon.

Flowing handwriting made by an ink-dipped pen suggested the letters’ antiquity, but the heading on the first page confirmed it: “U.S.S. Sloop of War Richmond, off Pas al Centro Mississippi, Sunday Nov. 10 A.D. 1861.” My excitement mounted as I struggled to decipher the writer’s words. I realized I was reading a first-person account of the Civil War.

                     Dear Lou,

  Yesterday I received your letters dated Sept. 8 Oct. per the gunboat Ethan Allen which were the first letters which I have received from anyone. Last mail I sent you a very long letter and have nothing of interest to write this time as far as news goes.  We have taken one little schooner since but she was of no account. She had on board eight or ten Mexicans who were trying to make their escape from New Orleans. We let them go on their way rejoicing. There is an enormous steamer now in sight up river but I do not think there is any hope of our having a chance to get a shot at her. We have certain news that there is a floating battery of 18 guns already for attacking us also one of 22 guns which is nearly ready and one of 15 guns on the stocks. We are now the only Ship at Pas al Centro and their batteries assisted by Steamers and battering Ram will be apt to give us all we can stand if they should attack us. We hear by those Mexicans which were in the schooner that our shell stove the Battering Ram aft so badly that two steamers were required to tow her up river, one on each side to keep her afloat. Capt. Pope has left the Richmond and gone home on sick leave, he was very feeble. I fear that he will not last long. I liked him much while he was here…

The author of the letters written in 1861 and 1862 was Captain Charles I. Gibbs. Within ten years he would become the landlord of young parents and a newborn baby, Thornton W. Burgess, whose biography I finished writing and saw published in 2013.

Capt. Gibbs’ natural, candid style of writing, keen observations, and obvious affection for his wife and friends in Sandwich added to the extraordinary first-hand description of the life of a Union officer aboard a 225-foot-long steamship engaged in major Civil War naval battles.

I felt like I was walking into a history book.

And I thought of my father, Lt. Commander Howard “Bud” Palmer, who was similarly a naval officer, less than a century later, on a troop landing ship (LST) engaged in another brutal and bloody war at Normandy in 1944, as well as at Anzio and Salerno. He too came home, safe if not sound, for his back was broken when a torpedo hit the ship. (Read my post “War, Honor, and My Cousin Phil”)

Today, Memorial Day 2015, I honor those countless numbers who died in the service of their country, but I especially remember and am thankful for two who lived: Captain Charles I. Gibbs and Lieutenant Commander Bud Palmer who returned from terrible wars to those who dearly loved them.    

Thornton W. Burgess and JFK

Fifty years ago today, Thornton Burgess, then 89, learned along with the rest of the world the devastating news that President John F. Kennedy had been shot and killed. Several weeks later he described his thoughts in a Dec. 8, 1963 letter to his Canadian friend, Stuart Trueman, editor of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal. “Shock follows shock,” he wrote. “We are still rather numb from the tragic loss of President Kennedy...we have lost an able and good man, a brilliant man, who had he lived might well have become a truly great man.”

But Burgess was no stranger to the horror of presidential assassinations. “[Kennedy] is the third President to be assassinated within the span of my lifetime,” he told Trueman. “I was a small boy when Garfield was shot and still have a vivid memory of the feeling of desolation that filled me as I heard the tolling of the village bells and saw the flags at half mast.” (1)  Burgess had been seven years old living in Sandwich, Massachusetts when Charles J. Guiteau shot President James Garfield on July 2, 1881. He was twenty-seven when President William McKinley was shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz on September 6, 1901 and died eight days later.

In fact, all four American presidential assassinations impacted Burgess’ life, for the dark shadow of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination only nine years before the author’s birth surely fell upon his childhood years in a New England town that had lost forty men in the Civil War.

Whether or not they ever met, Thornton Burgess and JFK knew of each other and were clearly mutual admirers. Rose Kennedy mentions in her autobiography that her son John’s favorite Burgess book was The Adventures of Reddy Fox. A few years ago Gene Schott, executive director of the Thornton W. Burgess Society, was telling visitors to the organization’s museum in Sandwich, now closed, about Kennedy’s fondness for the author’s animal stories.  A woman in the group interrupted his talk with her own anecdote. Her father was a close friend of the president, she said. Knowing Kennedy’s fondness for Burgess’ animal books, her father had visited Thornton Burgess, then in his late 80s, at the Mary Lyon Nursing Home in Hampden, Massachusetts to obtain an autographed and inscribed copy of Reddy Fox for him. When he delivered the signed book to Kennedy in the White House, she said, the president immediately sat down in his rocking chair and began to read Burgess’ story of a headstrong young fox who had many lessons to learn.

(1) Information provided by the University of New Brunswick, Harriet   Library.