Passing Strange (16 page)

None of his burgeoning New York friendships proved so important to King as his new connection with John Hay, a writer and public servant as precocious in his own field as King had been in his. A recent graduate of Brown, Hay went to the White House in 1861 as the twenty-two-year-old assistant secretary to Abraham Lincoln and a part of the extended household at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. While King walked across the continent and mapped the California peaks, Hay stood by Lincoln’s side through the long, dark days of war, and he was there at his bedside as the president drew his last breath. For five years following Lincoln’s assassination, Hay lived mainly overseas, in a series of diplomatic posts in Paris, Vienna, and Madrid. At some point, though, his path crossed King’s.
⁶
In 1870 he resigned to return to the United States, and by the time he and King struck up their friendship again in the mid-1870s, Hay had reinvented himself as a man of letters: hardworking journalist for Reid at the
Tribune
and author of a series of comic ballads and of
Castilian Days
(1871), a book of essays based on his time in Madrid.
⁷
As an investor in the diamond bubble of 1872 who was saved from loss by King’s brilliant exposé, Hay no doubt felt indebted to his new friend.
⁸

King and Hay struck up a conversation in New York—about art and politics, life and women—that would be rekindled a few years later in Washington and continue unabated until King’s death. If it lacked the adolescent physicality of King’s friendship with Gardiner and the easy intimacy born of a shared boyhood, it had the tempered steadiness of a deep friendship between two men already tested in the forge of life. Through shifts in fortune and family circumstances, personal tragedy and professional triumphs, the two would remain devoted confidants. They kept in touch by letters during their long periods apart, arranged weekend rendezvous, fell into impromptu get-togethers whenever they unexpectedly found themselves in the same locale. They shared an interest in Republican politics, Spanish culture, public duty, and fine things (an interest easier for Hay to indulge since he married a wealthy heiress in 1874). King admired Hay’s stolid respectability; Hay felt drawn to King’s “astonishing power of diffusing happiness wherever he went.”
⁹
Both, it turns out, kept secrets from the other. But till the very end, their mutual devotion endured. And, as the world would later learn, Hay’s devotion to King continued on long after King’s death.

 

 

KING’S WORK ON HIS survey report proceeded slowly, in part because he dealt with a complex subject, in part because he occasionally fled west to deal with his various mining and ranching ventures. The scientific world thus looked forward with anticipation to his commencement address at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School in June 1877, expecting that the talk on “Catastrophism and Evolution” would offer a preview of his long-awaited summary of his geological tome.

King did not disappoint. Tackling the ongoing debate about the rate of change in the environment, he took a bold swipe at the uniformitarians, who posited a slow, gradual rate of geological change, projecting present-day conditions back into the past. The uniformitarians held sway in the American scientific community, and their ideas seemed to find support in Darwin’s theories about the gradual rate of change in the biological record. But King argued that they failed to take into account the geological record, which revealed breaks more dramatic than could be found in the fossil record alone. “A mere Malthusian struggle was not the author and finisher of Evolution,” King proclaimed; “he who brought to bear that mysterious energy we call life upon primeval matter bestowed at the same time a power of development by change, arranging that the interaction of energy and matter which make up the environment should, from time to time, burst in upon the current of life and sweep it onward and upward to ever higher and better manifestations. Moments of great catastrophe, thus translated into the language of life, become moments of creation, when out of plastic organisms something newer and nobler is called into being.”
¹⁰
King offered up a theory of modified catastrophism, admitting of sudden but not all-destructive change, to explain what he read as the evidence of great volcanic eruptions and cataclysmic glacial floods in the geology of the American West. He believed in Darwin’s theories but thought the fossil record would show that the
rate
of biological adaptation, rather than always proceeding at a uniform pace, could occur with greater rapidity in response to abrupt climatological change.
¹¹

King’s great synthesis of western geology appeared in 1878, the penultimate volume in the Fortieth Parallel survey’s series of scholarly final reports. In the pages of King’s
Systematic Geology,
the Great Basin fully entered the realm of American science. King told his story chronologically, beginning with the Archean or Precambrian period and working toward the present, carefully explaining the great climatic forces that shaped the creation and movement of the earth’s geologic layers. The 815-page book never found a fraction of the readers of King’s popular
Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada,
but it became an instant classic in the field of historical geology. King laid out the age and composition of the sedimentary rock sequences and traced their structural dislocations, mapped out the location and composition of the igneous rocks, documented the effects of glaciation, and put it all together to tell the deep history of a vast stretch of the American continent. “It was,” writes the historian William Goetzmann, “a story only a trifle less dramatic than Genesis.”
¹²

The completion of his scientific magnum opus and the official end of the survey left King poised to make what he considered “the most important contribution I ever made to science.” “That act,” he later wrote a colleague, “was the crushing of the old system of personal survey.”
¹³

 

 

FERDINAND V. HAYDEN, GEORGE WHEELER, and John Wesley Powell had competed for years for government funding of their western surveys, while King enjoyed the luxury of multiyear appropriations. First in the field, and now first to finish, King could step back to assess the efficiency of the system knowing he had nothing to lose. In March 1878, as part of a broader effort to stimulate the economy, reduce federal expenditures, and improve the civil service system, Congress requested through the secretaries of the interior and war that Hayden, Wheeler, and Powell outline their accomplishments and detail any duplication between the surveys. And at King’s suggestion, New York congressman Abram Hewitt (whose own holdings in the steel and iron industries made him a particularly interested party) arranged in June for Congress to direct the National Academy of Sciences to examine the federal survey system. King positioned himself as an adviser to the academy’s study group and helped shape its final recommendation to replace the current surveys with two larger agencies: a Coast and Interior Survey responsible for the geodetic, topographic, and land-parceling surveys of the public domain, and a Geological Survey to study the geological structure and natural resources of the public lands. In line with a growing concern about the integrity of civil servants, the advisory committee also recommended that the director and members of the Geological Survey have no personal interests in the land or resources of the region under study and make no investigations on behalf of private parties or corporations.
¹⁴

Congress took some of the recommendations to heart, but in the end decided to create only one new agency to deal with the public lands. On March 3, 1879, legislators passed an act establishing the United States Geological Survey within the Department of the Interior for the “classification of the public lands and the examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain.”
¹⁵
And less than three weeks later, thanks to some serious political maneuvering by his friends and support from his fellow survey leader John Wesley Powell, King defeated his rival, Ferdinand V. Hayden, to secure President Rutherford B. Hayes’s nomination to become the agency’s first director. There had been a bit of whispering against King “on the grounds that while in Government employ, formerly, he performed service for one or more corporations and exacted large fees from them.” But supporters testified to the excellence of his work and explained that under his contract it “was entirely legitimate” for him to take on outside jobs.
¹⁶
King, who had helped to write the legislation’s ethics clauses, prevailed. He intended to stay at the helm of the bureau “only long enough to appoint its staff, organize its work and guide the forces into full activity.”
¹⁷
He had personal business interests he wanted to pursue. But for now, no other position could give him such an extraordinary opportunity to shape the future of American science. He prepared to move to Washington and leave New York behind.

 

 

FEW OF KING’S FRIENDS or associates knew it, but King’s New York was a complicated place that extended far beyond the cozy reading rooms of the Century Association or the familiar blocks of his workaday world. For late at night—his day’s work complete, his social obligations discharged—Clarence King liked to go slumming, setting out into the darkened streets of lower Manhattan, an anonymous denizen of the night.

“Often of a night,” King’s secretary, Edgar Beecher Bronson, recalled, King would order him to grab a “stout stick” and follow him out from the survey headquarters at 23 Fifth Avenue where they lived and worked into the dark. “And then down through Washington Square we would go, plunging thence into the wildest jungles of ‘Africa,’ as the Thompson-Sullivan Street region was then known, there wandering, not infrequently, throughout the livelong night, in Quixotic search of adventure.”
¹⁸
The African American writer James Weldon Johnson visited the neighborhood in 1884 and recalled it as little more than a succession of “stuffy rooms” in which he sat while his grandmother talked about “old times” with her elderly friends.
¹⁹
But in search of adventure, King and Bronson never noticed that domestic world.

The term “slumming
”
entered the English language in the mid-1880s to describe the practice of visiting the crowded neighborhoods of the urban poor “for charitable or philanthropic purposes, or out of curiosity, especially as a fashionable pursuit.”
²⁰
But neither philanthropy nor fashion motivated King’s late-night strolls. He ventured out into the neighborhoods of the poor to recapture that sense of heightened sensual excitement he had experienced among the Spanish ranchos of California or the simple huts on a Hawaiian beach. “With a learning so comprehensive and profound as to have maintained him among the foremost
savants
of his generation,” Bronson wrote of King, “the hours dearest to him were spent in absolute or semi-savagery.” Bronson recalled how King treasured the hours spent sitting by an Indian fireside, watching the games of a Paiute village, competing in a bronco-riding contest, hiking the Sierra: “silent in a negro cabin, listening to the croonings of a turbaned black grandmother, hungry for some sort of voodoo mysteries—such were the hours he loved best.”
²¹
And so, during the day and into the evening they labored over the survey reports, but at night they went out walking.

King’s friends later recorded the stories of his similar expeditions into the slums of London, where the practice seemed charming, evidence of his insatiable curiosity and vast sympathy for all mankind. But of these New York rambles they knew nothing.

In his brief account of their nighttime strolls, Bronson never suggests whether he and King ever sought sexual adventures. He preserves only a tale of pugilistic glory. One morning before dawn, in a dark and silent alley off Sullivan Street, the two happened upon a policeman “needlessly clubbing a drunken sailor.” Without hesitation, King handed Bronson his stick, “pitched into the policeman with his good bare hands, and pounded him to a pulp; and then, before the policeman could recover sufficiently to summon aid, we legged it back north for our diggings.” King loved the “fair chance of a good hard scrap, when the incentive was the righting or avenging of a wrong.” Indeed, Bronson added, “he used to hunt such chances.”
²²

In secret, then, King claimed the Manhattan night as his new frontier, a place to test himself in a world governed by rules and values so different from those of his comfortable professional life. The dim and flickering gas lamps, not to be replaced by electric lights until the late 1880s, cast an otherworldly glow on the downtown streets, making the urban night a ghostly shadow of the busy sunlit city.
²³
In Manhattan, King might not have the opportunity to chase down deserters or show his stuff in a buffalo stampede, but after a day at his desk he could still test his manhood on a midnight stroll through the darkened streets.
²⁴
Like the “white Negroes” or “hipsters” that Norman Mailer would write about after World War II, King drifted out after dark into the city’s African American communities, “a frontiersman in the Wild West of American night life.”
²⁵

The Senate confirmed King’s appointment as director of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) on April 3, 1879, and on May 24 (after returning to Washington from a hurried trip west to tend to his cattle interests) King took the oath of office. He moved quickly to establish a clear mission-oriented program of research, much as he had done with the Fortieth Parallel survey, emphasizing investigations of the nation’s mineral resources that would not only yield results of practical value to industry but also help answer more basic questions about earth science. The attorney general’s interpretation of “national domain” restricted the agency’s focus to land in the public domain, a deep frustration for King, who saw the need for a more comprehensive survey of the nation’s mineral resources. So he forged an informal alliance with the Census Office to conduct a fuller investigation of resources east of the Mississippi and on the West’s private lands. In the public-land states west of the Mississippi, King moved decisively to set up regional headquarters to oversee the USGS’s fieldwork, mindful of how much time he had lost shuttling between East and West. He also sought to reform the existing system for distribution of the public lands, proposing new methods that would, among other things, take into account John Wesley Powell’s prescient warning that the older systems of land distribution developed in the East were ill suited for the arid West. These land-reform plans came to naught, but King’s ambitious first year of operations (his men visited more than two thousand mines) made a lasting impact on government science and set the tenor of USGS operations for many decades to come. King showed the importance of employing highly skilled scientists to do the agency’s work and clearly demonstrated that research intended to yield immediately useful results could also contribute toward the advance of basic science.
²⁶